Ad spending on short form video across Southeast Asia is projected to grow at a compound annual rate above ten percent through 2028, according to Statista's regional advertising forecasts, pushing the format's market volume past one and a half billion US dollars by the end of the decade. In Vietnam specifically, that growth is not an abstract line on a chart. It shows up directly in the production briefs landing on studio desks in Ho Chi Minh City, where clients increasingly ask for a library of nine or sixteen vertical cuts before they ask for a single hero film.
The shift traces back to where commerce itself has moved. TikTok Shop's gross merchandise value in Vietnam surpassed ten billion US dollars in 2025, growing more than two hundred percent year on year, and by several market trackers the platform has overtaken Shopee to become the country's largest e-commerce channel by share. Shopee still holds a large base of buyers, but its growth slowed to single digits by the third quarter of 2025 even as TikTok Shop posted sixty nine percent growth and expanded to roughly forty one percent share. That kind of migration does not happen without a matching migration in the content that sells.
Where the demand actually sits
Vietnamese users spend an average of forty five to sixty minutes a day on TikTok, and short form clips now account for more than half of all time spent across digital platforms in the country, per multiple regional digital behavior trackers. For a brand marketing team, that statistic reframes the production brief entirely. A single thirty second commercial, however well crafted, reaches an audience that increasingly does not scroll past minute one of anything. What replaces it is not one film but a set: a hook edited for the first two seconds, a product demonstration cut for a feed, a founder or presenter clip built for a livestream teaser.
The economics of volume over polish
By the end of 2025, Vietnam's digital economy carried an estimated gross merchandise value near thirty nine billion US dollars, a seventeen percent year on year expansion that ranks it among the fastest growing digital economies in Southeast Asia, with e-commerce alone accounting for roughly two thirds of that total according to figures compiled under the e-Conomy SEA research umbrella. Budgets tied to that commerce layer behave differently from classic brand budgets. They are allocated weekly rather than quarterly, tied to campaign cadence rather than a single seasonal push, and they reward a production partner that can turn footage into a dozen usable cuts rather than one polished five minute film. Studios positioned around that cadence, among them production houses in Saigon such as Hoang Films, describe an intake mix that has quietly rebalanced toward recurring short form batches alongside the traditional commercial and brand film work shown in their portfolio.
Southeast Asia as a shared engine, not a side market
Southeast Asia has historically accounted for the overwhelming majority of TikTok Shop item volume since the format's commercial launch, with Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Indonesia forming the core of that base, and Indonesia leading on livestream adoption specifically. For advertisers running regional campaigns, that concentration means a Vietnam based production run increasingly gets planned alongside output for neighboring markets rather than in isolation, a pattern that mirrors the broader shift of commercial production budgets toward the region described in earlier coverage of the Ho Chi Minh City production market.
What the format is doing to the brief itself
The wider Asia Pacific advertising market is forecast to cross roughly one trillion US dollars in total spend by 2026, with digital formats, video chief among them, absorbing a growing share of that figure according to eMarketer's regional ad spend estimates. Inside that figure, short form is not simply a cheaper cousin of a television commercial. It carries its own grammar: vertical framing from the first frame, a message compressed into the opening beat, and an assumption that the viewer decides whether to keep watching before the brand name ever appears. Agencies commissioning work in Vietnam increasingly write that grammar into the brief itself rather than treating it as a repurposing afterthought, which has begun to reshape how production houses in the city, including Hoang Films, scope and quote a project from the outset.
The net effect, visible across the statistics cited above, is a production market where volume and speed compete with polish as a measure of value, and where a studio's ability to plan for both in the same shoot day has become a genuine differentiator rather than a footnote.
