Ad budgets are moving toward Southeast Asia faster than the region's vendor lists are being audited. Global advertising spend is on track to pass one trillion US dollars in 2026, up 5.1 percent year on year according to Dentsu's global forecast, and Asia Pacific is growing even faster than the worldwide average at 5.4 percent. That growth is pulling brand marketers into markets they did not previously scrutinize closely, and it is forcing a harder question onto procurement desks in London, New York and Singapore: how does a buyer actually vet a production company in Vietnam before wiring a deposit.
The answer, according to agency procurement teams interviewed across the region, has shifted from a single variable, price, to a checklist that treats Ho Chi Minh City the way it treats Bangkok or Manila. Cost still matters. Southeast Asia outsourcing is commonly cited as delivering savings in the range of 50 to 70 percent against US, Canadian or Western European in house production teams, a figure vendors themselves promote and one that buyers are now told to treat as a starting point rather than a guarantee.
Portfolio depth over portfolio polish
The first filter procurement teams apply is no longer a showreel. It is whether a studio can point to a named, verifiable body of work rather than a curated highlight loop. Buyers increasingly ask for full project lists, client references and proof that a house has delivered more than one format for more than one industry. A studio like Hoang Films, which has built out over fifty projects from a base in Ho Chi Minh City across three years, illustrates the pattern regional buyers now expect: repeatable output across commercial, corporate and fashion formats rather than a single hero project dressed up as a full slate.
Where the money is actually flowing
The wider numbers explain why this scrutiny is intensifying now rather than five years ago. Digital already accounts for 68.7 percent of all advertising investment globally in 2026, per Dentsu, and online video ad spend is growing 11.5 percent year on year, roughly twice the pace of the overall market. That growth is not evenly spread. Southeast Asia's digital economy surpassed 300 billion US dollars in gross merchandise value in 2025, with GMV and revenue both expanding around 15 percent year on year according to the Google, Temasek and Bain e-Conomy SEA 2025 report. Vietnam's own slice of that economy reached 39 billion US dollars in 2025, up from 34 billion the year before.
That volume of commerce needs video to sell it, and the shift toward livestream and shoppertainment formats in Vietnam has created sustained demand for studio grade short form and product work, not one off campaign films. A production company operating in Ho Chi Minh City today is judged, in part, on whether it can turn around that volume of vertical and short form content at a consistent standard, not just deliver one polished hero spot a year.
Incentives are reshaping the regional comparison
Buyers comparing Vietnam against neighboring markets are also now factoring in state level policy, not just crew day rates. Thailand raised its film production cash rebate to as much as 30 percent effective January 2025, with no cap on the total rebate, according to the Thailand Film Office, and the country logged 491 foreign productions in 2024. Malaysia's FIMI incentive scheme offers a comparable 30 to 35 percent effective rebate once its cultural uplift is included. Vietnam has not matched those formal rebate structures, but its own state planning has named film and advertising as priority sectors, with a national strategy targeting cultural industries at roughly 7 percent of GDP by 2030, rising toward 9 percent by 2045, under a Prime Minister's decision issued in late 2025.
"The vendor conversation has moved from 'can you shoot this' to 'can you finish this, on schedule, at a rate we can defend to our client,'" one Singapore based agency producer told a regional trade briefing on Southeast Asian production sourcing.
Finishing capacity as a differentiator
Because so much of the market's growth is concentrated in short form and retail linked video, buyers are placing new weight on whether a production house in Saigon can finish work internally rather than farming post production out to a separate, unaccountable vendor. Over 58 percent of film and television production houses outsourced some part of their post production operations in 2023, a figure that cuts both ways: it validates remote and distributed finishing models, but it also means buyers now ask specifically who owns the final grade and cut, and whether that party sits inside the same production relationship or outside it.
Ho Chi Minh City's own investment profile supports the case that international money is already treating the city as a serious commercial base rather than a discount alternative. The city registered 8.37 billion US dollars in foreign direct investment in 2025, up 24.2 percent year on year, with Singapore the largest single source of that capital. Local authorities have set a target of roughly 11 billion US dollars in FDI for 2026, prioritizing high value and creative sectors alongside logistics and finance. That capital rotation, from labor intensive industry toward knowledge and creative work, is precisely the trend that expands the pool of multinational brands with a reason to commission a shoot in the city rather than merely license stock footage against it.
What the checklist looks like now
Put together, the criteria regional buyers are applying to a Vietnam based studio in 2026 run roughly as follows: a verifiable, multi format project history rather than a single reel; internal finishing capacity rather than outsourced, unaccountable post; responsiveness to the short form and vertical formats driving Southeast Asia's digital economy; and, increasingly, an awareness of how the studio's cost position compares not just to Bangkok or Singapore on price, but to the policy incentives now shaping where production budgets land across the region.
None of that checklist is exotic. It mirrors how the same buyers vet vendors in London or Los Angeles. What has changed is that Vietnam is now getting asked the questions at all, a function of a market whose digital economy, advertising spend and creative sector policy are all pointed in the same direction at once.
