Attend any marketing event in APAC, and you’ll hear conversations about how management wants to focus on performance campaigns that deliver results, and that investing in branding is a luxury only when budgets allow.
The choice to focus on performance marketing over brand marketing is understandable when the pressure to grow is relentless, and every dollar is scrutinized. But as the World Advertising Research Center (WARC) report The Pace Principle demonstrates, marketers who balance both achieve better outcomes.
If your campaigns are built on performance alone, you’re borrowing against brand equity in which you may not have sufficiently invested. And if your brand investment lacks the quality controls to protect it, unsuitable content may quietly undo the work.
The challenge is not choosing one or the other. It’s balancing both by directly linking media quality and campaign performance to ensure that efficiency never comes at the expense of brand reputation. As WPP Media Philippines CEO Crisela Cervantes noted during a recent DV webinar, “When consumers trust brands, they actually purchase those brands.”
Verifying media quality optimizes a campaign to deliver the performance marketers want.
When brands work with DV to ensure that their ads appear in quality, contextually relevant environments, we see the improvements firsthand. Brand suitability tools “drive brand outcomes, not just…media metrics,” Unilever Indonesia Head of Personal Care Social and Growth Initiatives Distya Tarworo Endri said during a DV panel discussion earlier this year.
In Asia Pacific, these outcomes are so dramatic that we’ve established a recognition program, the DV Pinnacle® Awards, to honor brands and agencies in the region that achieve exceptional results with DV solutions and products, including our brand suitability offerings. (LIONS, which oversees WARC, is a jury partner for this program.)
By protecting brand equity, brands lay the foundation necessary for performance campaigns to deliver results.
What makes this conversation even more urgent is the media-quality context in which Asia Pacific marketers operate.
While DV advertiser customers are protected, APAC has the highest brand suitability violation rate of all regions DV serves, according to the 2026 DV Global Insights report, Media Quality in the Age of AI. The rise of AI slop content is likely to accelerate this rate, which is already above benchmark in some of APAC’s largest content categories, including travel and technology.
The impact of AI slop on brand reputation is detrimental. Most APAC consumers, especially in Australia, Japan and Singapore, hold a negative opinion of brands that advertise next to low-quality AI-generated content. One in two consumers said they would be less likely to purchase from brands whose ads appear alongside content they find objectionable. In India and the Philippines, more than 60% of consumers said they would actively discourage friends and family from using a brand they perceived as poorly aligned.
The marketer who ignores this is optimizing for short-term clicks while quietly eroding the brand equity that makes those clicks meaningful.
The data-backed findings in WARC’s report make it clear that to achieve sustainable growth in our region, brand and performance strategies must work in concert, not in competition. DV is ready to help Asia Pacific brands build campaigns that prove what The Pace Principle has now established.
Stay tuned for examples of how our clients have achieved this when we announce the DV Pinnacle Awards results in October.