Campaign Connect Hong Kong, a one-day industry forum organised by Campaign Asia-Pacific, is underway in the SAR.
100+ marketing executives from across sectors have gathered to discuss emerging technologies, evolving consumer behaviour and demographic changes in Hong Kong and its impact on brand strategy. Throughout the day, conversations will focus on how marketers can adapt to an increasingly fragmented media landscape, the rise of AI-powered discovery, and the evolving expectations of digitally native audiences.
The conference opened with a keynote from Neil Patel, co-founder of NP Digital, who examined how online discovery is changing in the age of AI. Patel discussed the mechanics behind zero-click search, the rapid growth of voice and visual search, and the expanding role of platform-driven recommendations in shaping how consumers find products and information.
Below are highlights from the day.
Keynote session: ‘Where did the click go?’
Neil Patel, co-founder of NP Digital
“My son is four years old. He loves buying products from Alexa. I didn’t know he was spending thousands and thousands of dollars ordering from Alexa. We never told him he could. He just figured it out.
If he wants chocolate and I say there’s no more candy in the house, he’ll just say, ‘Alexa, order me chocolate,’ and it shows up the next day. Then I’m like, who ordered this package? And it’s under my name.
But the point is: you don’t need a click to gain a transaction anymore. The click is disappearing.
41% of Google searches now end without a click. On mobile, the zero-click rate is 77%. That’s kind of crazy.”
‘Most people just bounce because they already got the answer’
“Google released something you all know about: AI overviews. And when someone sees an AI overview, the outcomes shift.
Most people just bounce because they get the answer right away. Only 18% people click on an external website and about 17% stay on Google, around 23.9% perform another search.
So yes, we’re getting fewer clicks. But we’re also seeing higher revenue per visit. A lot of the traffic you lost wasn’t traffic that was going to make you money anyway.
When you look at things like generative engine optimisation or answer engine optimisation, where you optimise to appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini, something interesting happens. It doesn’t drive a lot of traffic. After 12 months, one company saw just 0.36% of traffic from ChatGPT but 5.82% of total sales.
We’ve never seen a higher-converting marketing channel. Optimising for ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude is five times higher converting than anything else. It even beats email and SMS.”
‘Quality outperforms volume’
“In today’s world, what’s winning is less noise and sharper moves. Quality outperforms volume.
A lot of people are using AI to produce huge amounts of content and a lot of that content is garbage. It’s mediocre. We call it AI slop. You either produce really good stuff, or don’t waste your time producing anything at all.”
‘The next generation already thinks typing is archaic’
“We all grew up with text-based searching. You opened your laptop, typed something in and searched. But now we’re seeing AI search, voice search and conversational search.
When I type a search, my four-year-old son will literally tell me I’m doing it wrong. He’ll say, ‘You’re looking at the wrong source, ask Siri or Alexa.’
To him, typing is archaic. The new generation already thinks that.
The future is going to be voice and even visual search.
Voice search is climbing quickly and will eventually become the default. Kids are growing up with voice devices, so it feels natural to them. Visual search is also exploding, and Google Lens searches have grown 1,900%. And one in five of those searches has commercial intent. Someone is trying to buy something.
That’s powerful. And it’s traffic you need to go after.”
Panel: Driving results with limited budgets and resources
Speakers: Reiko Kwok, chief marketing officer, Exinity and Justin Bonnett, regional head of marketing, JLL.
Moderator: Gigi Cheung, founder & CEO, Rainbow Team Consultancy; Former VP for Brand Partnership, K11 (NWD).
When resources are tight, how can marketers maximise impact without overextending their teams? This was the key theme of the panel.
Cheung's observation: “For smaller and mid-sized teams, integration across multiple channels is about focus, knowing which platforms actually drive results, not just activity.” She acknowledged the ongoing temptation to chase “the next shiny tool,” reminding marketers to prioritise measurable impact over novelty.
Justin Bonnett added: “I always go back to what’s worked,” he said. “If a creative asset continues to perform, we keep using it. It’s about doing more with less.” His approach includes in-house market research using AI and taking a data-driven view of channel effectiveness, even switching off underperforming ones to measure true impact.
He also emphasised the long-term value of brand investment, despite budget pressures. “There are no shortcuts,” Justin said. “You won’t see instant results, but a strong brand delivers stronger ROI over time. That’s what helps you weather performance pressures.”
Reiko highlighted the challenges of managing an abundance of marketing tools. “Companies often invest in too many platforms that don’t integrate or get fully used,” she said. “Efficiency isn’t about having more tools, it’s about streamlining the process.”
On agency relationships, Reiko stressed that external partners must bring tangible strategic value, especially when helping brands expand into new markets. Collaboration between sales and marketing was another priority. “Marketing brings in the leads, but sales converts them. We have to work closely to ensure the quality of leads aligns with business goals.”
The panellists agreed that retention and personalisation, especially for high-value customers, should remain a focus even when budgets tighten. As Reiko summed up, “B2B or B2C, it’s the same principle. Understand your customer and deliver value.”
Interactive roundtables in action: Led by senior industry experts, share real-world AI successes, failures and lessons on balancing automation with human judgment in marketing.
Interactive roundtables in action: Led by senior industry leaders, marketers share their real-world AI and new tech successes, failures and lessons.
Case Study: The power of messy moments
Jennifer Lin, Head of Feminine Care Core Marketing, International
Kimberly-Clark
“When we chat with parents, we ask them, ‘Can you show us the cute photos of your kids?’ We expect to see lots of beautiful, adorable pictures. But when they flip through their phones, most of the photos aren’t cute at all.
They’re the funny, messy moments with babies pooping, making a mess while eating, or lying on the floor crying. Those messy moments are actually the ones parents save as favourites.
That really resonated with us. In baby products, there are already so many cute baby ads out there. If we create another cute baby campaign, it’s just like a fish ball in hot soup—nothing happens.
So we asked: what if we did a messy campaign instead of a cute one?
That’s how the idea for the campaign came about. Instead of creating cute babies ourselves, we invited our consumers to be co-creators and asked them to submit funny, messy photos they already had, along with a short caption.
Instantly, we received thousands of submissions. You can imagine… thousands of consumers co-creating with us. Thousands of photographers who spend every day with their favourite celebrities—their babies.
Because they are the mums, the way they write and capture those moments is exactly how they think and engage.
We took all these materials and combined them with our branded message to create the campaign assets. Who knew that photos with messy faces, funny moments would drive a huge engagement?
Because we had such a large pool of content, we posted different photos on social media and watched which ones performed best. Then we went back to the submissions and created more content based on what resonated.”
What the commercial shoot looked like
“Usually when we shoot a commercial, everything follows a very standardised storyboard. But this time we did it differently. We set up a few scenes we wanted, but when the babies arrived, they simply played.
We talked with the parents and asked what their babies liked to play with. Then we filled the set with those toys and let them explore. There was no storyline. Some babies cried, some just stared at us, some even fell asleep.
Imagine a baby falling asleep with two or three cameras in front and 20 people behind. That’s not something you can put in a storyboard. It has to be real.
Those moments came from co-creating with our consumers and their babies.
The campaign felt very fresh, and engagement was strong. We even created a fan club for the baby ‘celebrities’ so consumers could interact with them.
It helped us build a community with parents who were already buying our products. Since launching the campaign, our market share has grown and it was still growing at the end of last year.”
Panel: Quality over quantity and other strategies
for retaining customer loyalty
Speakers: Thomas Elliott, executive
producer & creative director, Casual Hong Kong. Iris Kan, HK and Macau marketing
director, L’Occitane, Rita Wong, head of customer centricity and brand marketing,
AIA Hong Kong and Macau.
Moderator: Jocelyn Tse, former CSO, UM China
What’s the single most critical factor in the customer journey?
Thomas Elliot: "A single word, trust, and trust is
very important in conversation with customers."
Iris Pan: "I love the word trust, and for me, I would say belonging right
now, I think customer loyalty is all about belonging to the brand, belonging to
the relationship with it."
Rita Wong: "For me, I think it's customer-centric. I know it sounds cliché,
but it's, in fact, especially for a company, insurers, everything that we do,
it needs to be really suitable for our customers' individual needs.
Is creating too much content a trend now? Authentic storytelling and personalised moments
Thomas Elliot: " Neil Patel was earlier on the stage and he talked about the ability to connect with the audience through content and storytelling. And it's not necessarily about quantity. It's really more about quality. It's about having stories that build authentic connections for doing this, that reach them in the life moments that matter to them.
"We are at a point in time where social media, which was designed to bring people closer together as a big social experience, in many ways has made us more fragmented, more isolated. So the ability to connect with your audience through storytelling is an important one. In that vein, the idea of a content pipeline is an important one, but you don't want to feed sewage to your audience."
Iris Pan: “In Latin America, we are celebrating our 50th anniversary this year. It’s a special moment for me to think about what loyalty really means and what experience we want to give our customers. As a heritage brand, the challenge is different because you have to keep evolving. And evolution is not just about technology upgrades. It’s about the relationship with the customer, the experience the brand provides, and the atmosphere we create for consumers.
"When I think about trends, I always come back to our brand DNA. We need to preserve it and embrace it, but at the same time keep creating meaningful moments for our customers. For example, when you walk into our store, you’ll see our hosts welcoming you with a smile. That connection with the consumer is core to our brand.
Fifty years ago, we were selling soap. Today we have many different body care products. But the product itself is not the most important thing. What matters is the value, the experience, and the emotional connection we create with the customer. That’s what builds a relationship that goes beyond the product and helps us stay relevant over time.”
Rita Wong: “I couldn’t agree more that it’s about evolution. Traditionally, insurance is a very low-frequency interaction and honestly, we hope it stays that way, because when insurance is activated, it usually means something difficult has happened. But the role of insurance has evolved. We’ve moved from being just a payer to becoming a partner in life.
Today, insurance is not only about claims. We help customers and the wider community manage their health and wealth so they can live healthier, longer lives without needing to make a claim. At AIA, our purpose is to help people live healthier, longer, better lives. Insurance still plays an important role during difficult moments, but our focus is also on helping customers stay healthy and plan for the future.
For example, someone might start with a simple insurance product when they graduate. Later, they may get married, have children, and begin thinking about retirement. We support them through those life stages and not just during claim moments. It's done via different touchpoints, including our app, events, promotions and other initiatives that support customers’ health and wealth throughout their journey.
Panel: The consumer journey of today and tomorrow
Speakers: Sumeshwer Dhuper, regional marketing director, Asia, Hill's Pet Nutrition (a Colgate-Palmolive company)
Martin Shaw, global head of digital marketing, Wealth and Personal Banking, HSBC
Moderator: Jocelyn Tse, independent strategist, Former CSO, UM China
'The messy middle is getting messier'
Sumeshwer Dhuper: "The consumer linear journey is dead, but we've been saying that for years, so maybe the consumer linear journey is even more dead. What we used to call the messy middle is getting messier in two ways. One, there's a lot more information, there's a lot more clutter, there's cognitive overload. There is so much content that it's killing trust. People don't trust anything. People don't know what's real and what's coming from AI."
Martin Shaw: "Ironically, for a consumer, the whole thing's become actually simpler. Go to your one AI system, and friction is really taken out. As a brand, we need to understand the platforms that consumers are on, seed our content out there."
"We have started using AI on production. We take pieces of content and take them to customers. Turn a financial report into videos, break it up into little social posts, get those into relevant places, scattering those scraps. We would not have been able to do that because of the production costs historically."
Brand and trust matter more than ever
Sumeshwer Dhuper: "Two things are becoming even more important. One, we all need to ask how we build trust when people see 500 things and they can't trust anything. And the second question is, in this entire mess, how do we help people find us? How do we build those memory structures? Brand building and performance marketing need to come a lot closer to each other.
"On one end, we're adopting AI really fast to scale things, to move fast, to create more personalised content. The other end is a brand and consistency end, where we need to start using technology to increase friction, to make it less agile. If last year we were creating five creatives, next year if you're creating 15,000 creatives, the risk of being schizophrenic just suddenly increases."
Imagine four years from now, a lot of people will be buying their soaps and shampoos by asking the AI agent to buy. One way is you ask the agent, 'buy me a shampoo,' and brands try to hack the algorithm. The other way is we work towards a world where that shopper goes to the agent and says, 'buy me Head & Shoulders'. We're building the brand to hack the consumer."
Martin Shaw: Trust is absolutely critical. At HSBC, people may trust us with their money for decades. Brand is really important. Customers will go down the list until they come to the first name that they feel really comfortable with, built on confidence in that brand.
"Brand advertising is performance-based. If you are doing brand advertising and you have no idea how it's performing for you, it's frankly not working. There's a different density of signals at different points in the journey, but measurement across all of that."
Panel: Population mix of Hong Kong: Redefining brand target audiences in a transforming city
Speakers: Charlotte Ho, general manager, branding & marketing, Hong Kong Resort Company Ltd (Discovery Bay)
Karrie Lam, deputy CEO, Sing Tao News Corporation
Tina Chao, chief marketing and digital customer experience officer, McDonald's Hong Kong
Moderator: Nikita Mishra, editor, Campaign Asia-Pacific
Platform shifts for new Hong Kongers
Charlotte Ho: "Traditional Hong Kongers use Facebook and IG; new ones prefer WeChat and Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book). To reach new residents or professionals, we must speak their language on their platforms, which has changed our strategies significantly."
Post-COVID experiential demand
"People now seek more experiential activities post-Covid. Our location's nature, hiking trails, and distance from the city centre is an advantage. Cost-consciousness is high, so we balance high-quality events with low costs."
Audience cohort evolution
Karrie Lam: "Previously, we segmented into three broad groups: business elites, young professionals, and Gen Z. Now, with new Hong Kongers at nearly 30% of the population... we focus on two major cohorts: native Hong Kongers and new Hong Kongers."
Content mindset differences
"Native Hong Kongers care about current affairs, policies, and local debates. New Hong Kongers seek practical tips: navigating schooling, healthcare, and investments. We tailor vertical content, Xiaohongshu and WeChat for newcomers; Instagram Stories and Reels for natives."
Beyond demographics
"The city and audiences are more multi-layered. We build sub-segments beyond income/age for contextual storytelling. Young professionals now include recent mainland arrivals with different views on Hong Kong."
New Hong Konger preferences
Tina Chao: "New arrivals prefer spicier palettes and value total experiences over absolute price. We create local unique menus originated in Hong Kong and exported globally, like Filet-O-Fish, Shaka Fries, and soup pasta for breakfast."
Brand with many faces
"Know what your brand stands for, that's your differentiator. Shift mindset from one-to-many to many-to-many: one brand identity with many faces for different groups. Deliver the right message in the right language to the right audience."
Mobile as new storefront
"Mobile is now a key storefront. Value isn't the absolute price but the experience/price equation. We include China mobile wallet options. Hong Kong isn't fully cashless like mainland China, but we've improved significantly."
[Quotes have been tweaked for brevity and clarity]
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific