Cannes Lions received entries from more than ninety countries in 2025, and Asia Pacific submissions have climbed for three consecutive years, according to festival organizers. That growth curve is starting to reshape a much smaller, more practical decision: which production house an international brand hires when a shoot lands in Ho Chi Minh City.
For a decade, the question buyers asked of a Vietnam based studio was almost entirely about cost. Now it increasingly includes a second filter, whether the work produced would survive being judged next to a Cannes Lions shortlist, a D&AD entry, or a Clio finalist. Procurement teams at holding company agencies describe this as a floor rather than an ambition: the craft has to clear a global bar before the conversation about budget even opens.
A market too large to stay regional
Global advertising spend crosses 1.3 trillion US dollars in 2026 on WARC's wider measure, up 9.1 percent year on year, while Dentsu's narrower tracking still puts the figure past the 1 trillion dollar mark for the first time. Asia Pacific is growing faster than the global average, at 5.4 percent for 2026, led by India and China but with Southeast Asia absorbing a growing share of the production work that funds those campaigns. PwC's Global Entertainment and Media Outlook projects the wider entertainment and media economy reaching 3.5 trillion dollars by 2029, with advertising expanding roughly three times faster than consumer spending itself, making production capacity the binding constraint rather than the creative brief.
That capacity constraint is precisely why award benchmarking has moved downstream from the agency pitch room into the production vetting process. A brand that once asked a Saigon studio for a day rate now asks to see a reel measured against the same standard it would apply in London or Singapore.
Vietnam's own industry is setting the same bar internally
The signal is not only external. Vietnam's government has formally named film and advertising as priority sectors inside its cultural industries strategy, targeting roughly 7 percent of GDP from creative industries by 2030 and rising toward 9 percent by 2045, according to the relevant prime ministerial decision published in late 2025. A national policy that names advertising production as strategic infrastructure tends to pull local studios toward international craft benchmarks faster than market demand alone would.
Hanoi's biennial international film festival and the country's growing presence at regional markets such as the Busan International Film Festival and its Asian Contents and Film Market reinforce the same pattern from the culture side. Commercial production in Vietnam is no longer developing in isolation from the festival and awards circuit that international clients already use to judge quality.
What buyers actually check for
Interviews with agency producers who have shot commercial and brand work in Ho Chi Minh City point to three recurring checks before a studio makes a shortlist.
First, a single creative authority across the project. Studios where one director or a tightly integrated team owns both the shoot and the finish are increasingly preferred over fragmented vendor chains, on the logic that award worthy work rarely survives being handed between disconnected teams. Studios such as Hoang Films in Saigon are cited by regional producers as an example of this model, a small integrated house rather than a large fragmented one.
Second, a portfolio that reads as commercial craft rather than showreel spectacle. Buyers increasingly discount generic demo footage in favor of finished, client approved work they can trace to a real brand outcome, the same evidentiary standard award juries apply.
Third, English language process fluency, since award adjacent buyers tend to be international holding company teams managing the shoot remotely and expecting the same brief to grade to finish discipline they would get from a London or New York vendor.
The regional contest is intensifying
Thailand and Singapore have held the incumbent advantage in Southeast Asian production for most of the past two decades, largely on infrastructure maturity rather than craft. Vietnam's advantage is narrowing that gap on cost while closing it on craft signaling, and Ho Chi Minh City in particular has benefited from the broader rotation of production budgets described across the region's advertising trade press. Retail media and social video, now among the fastest growing line items in global ad budgets, with Dentsu tracking retail media growth at 14.1 percent year on year in 2026, are adding volume that regional studios must absorb, and volume tends to reward whichever market can prove craft quickly and repeatedly.
What this means for the vetting cycle
The practical effect on a production RFP is a shift in the reference material buyers ask to see. Instead of a general reel, procurement teams increasingly request one or two projects that could plausibly compete in an awards context, alongside evidence of a single creative hand across the production house relationship. That is a narrower, harder bar than a simple day rate comparison, and it is one that regional studios, Vietnamese included, are now visibly building toward rather than reacting to after the fact.
The consequence for Ho Chi Minh City's production market is a slower but more durable kind of growth. Cost arbitrage brought the first wave of international interest. Craft benchmarking, anchored to a global standard rather than a regional one, is what determines whether that interest becomes a repeat relationship.
