Southeast Asia's digital economy crossed 300 billion USD in gross merchandise value in 2025, growing at roughly 15 percent year on year, according to the Google, Temasek and Bain e-Conomy SEA report. A large share of that growth is not being sold through banner ads or thirty second spots. It is being sold through content people choose to watch: skits, mini series, creator collaborations and short films built around a product rather than a pitch for one.
The shift has a name in trade circles, branded entertainment, and it has quietly become one of the fastest growing lines of work for production studios across the region. Vietnam, with one of the most mobile first and video first populations anywhere, sits close to the center of that shift.
A market too saturated for interruption
Vietnam counts 76.2 million social media user identities, equivalent to 75.2 percent of the population, and smartphone penetration of 84.4 percent against a 63 percent global average, according to DataReportal's Digital 2025 Vietnam report. TikTok alone reaches 76.1 million users aged 18 and over in the country, a scale that puts Vietnam among the platform's largest global markets.
That density changes the economics of attention. When a population spends this much time inside short form feeds, a conventional ad increasingly competes not with a rival brand's ad but with a stranger's dance video or a friend's livestream. Southeast Asian online media advertising, the category that includes influencer and content partnerships, grew 16 percent year on year in 2025 on the same e-Conomy SEA measure, a faster clip than most legacy ad categories in the region. Analysts covering the market attribute the gap largely to retail media networks and AI powered ad formats absorbing budget that once sat in display and pre roll.
Retail platforms are pulling content upstream
Vietnam's online retail turnover across its four major platforms reached roughly 429.7 trillion VND, close to 16.35 billion USD, in 2025, up 34.75 percent year on year according to data compiled by Metric and reported by The Investor. TikTok Shop's share of that market rose to somewhere between 39 and 41 percent, up from around 29 to 30 percent a year earlier, with TikTok Shop and Shopee together controlling close to 97 percent of gross merchandise value in the first quarter of 2025.
Platforms built around watchable content do not reward the same creative as platforms built around search or a static feed. A product has to earn a scroll stop inside a stream of entertainment, which is why marketers increasingly commission narrative shorts, comedic skits and character driven series instead of straightforward demonstrations. Industry observers frame this as shoppertainment, a blend of shopping behavior and entertainment consumption that treats the commercial itself as the content rather than an interruption to it.
What gets commissioned changes, not just where
The format shift shows up in what studios are asked to produce. Agencies and brands are increasingly briefing episodic comedic pieces built around a recurring character or a small cast, rather than a single thirty second cutdown repeated across formats. Vietnamese studios have picked up this kind of work for regional agency clients: Hoang Films in Ho Chi Minh City, for instance, produced the comedic branded series PopPop Hihi and the character led piece StressMama Flying Jacket for the agency Adigart, both built around narrative and comic timing rather than a conventional product pitch.
"The commercial that performs is the one nobody skips, and increasingly that means the one that does not look like a commercial at all," is how one regional media buyer summarized the shift to a Vietnamese trade outlet covering the shoppertainment boom.
That production style, close to a documentary or narrative crew's toolkit rather than a classic ad shoot, is one reason global entertainment and media revenue is forecast by PwC to reach 3.5 trillion USD by 2029, up from close to 3 trillion in 2024, with advertising growing roughly three times faster than consumer spending across the same period. Advertising, in other words, is increasingly financed and produced like entertainment.
Policy is already pointed at this convergence
Vietnam's own industrial policy has caught up with the trend. A prime ministerial decision issued in November 2025 sets a national target for cultural industries, which explicitly names film and advertising as priority sectors, to reach roughly 7 percent of GDP by 2030 and closer to 9 percent by 2045. Ho Chi Minh City registered 8.37 billion USD in foreign direct investment in 2025, up 24.2 percent year on year, with city authorities citing a deliberate rotation of capital toward knowledge intensive and creative sectors rather than labor intensive manufacturing.
None of this guarantees any single studio's growth. But it does describe a market where the line between advertising production and entertainment production is eroding faster than most planning cycles account for, and where brands that keep commissioning content shaped like a straight ad are competing for attention against creators, platforms and, increasingly, other brands that no longer bother.
Studios positioned across both disciplines, able to move between a commercial brief and a narrative one without changing crews, are the ones picking up the resulting work. A production house in Ho Chi Minh City built around a single directing and editing sensibility, the model behind the Hoang Films portfolio, is one shape that convergence has taken in the local market.
