Asia-Pacific's live commerce landscape has transformed influencers into the new faces of retail. From skincare and fashion to financial advice and even grocery items, sellers on live streaming apps can move billions in a single day, driven by evolving platforms, AI‑enabled transactions, and shifting consumer preferences toward immersive shopping experiences. The thrill is undeniable – but so are the risks.
Live commerce platforms like Douyin, Taobao, Shopee and TikTok often lack real‑time compliance monitoring, leaving gaps in detecting misinformation or unsafe claims. Yet the appetite for this format continues to grow. In 2025, revenue for live commerce in Asia-Pacific continues to grow, reaching $612 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to $2 trillion within the next decade.
“Digital conversations move very fast,” says Tessi Fathia Adam, senior group head of technology business accelerator at ParagonCorp, Indonesia’s largest cosmetics company. “Behind every host, there is usually an operator or support team working hand-in-hand with the them throughout the session – monitoring audience response, product interest, and checkout movement, while also giving real-time input to increase engagement, clarify key messages, or push product conversion more effectively.”
“The objective is not only to track numbers,” she adds, “but to make sure we can quickly read audience response, identify what is working, and adjust the content angle while the campaign is still running.”
This collaborative approach is commonplace among brands and agencies, where “operators” sit behind the camera and monitor comments, audience sentiment and the host’s performance in real-time, but this isn’t always sustainable, especially at scale.
From broadcast studios to decentralised streams
Thirty years ago, home shopping networks mastered the playbook of live shopping – creating urgency with countdowns and flashing phone lines, but those broadcasts were centralised, scripted, and easy to monitor. Today’s live commerce is decentralised across thousands of creators, multiple platforms, and diverse formats, with comments, transactions, and content all moving quickly at real-time. That fragmentation makes compliance and brand safety far harder to enforce.
“In dynamic environments, particularly live streaming or real-time content, our focus is on agility and clear governance,” says Dheeraj Raina SVP and head of integrated marketing and communications, SEA at Mastercard, “Internally, we maintain close coordination between marketing, communications, and agency partners to enable fast validation and response where needed, but we also establish clear guidelines around tone, messaging boundaries and compliance upfront to ensure creators have clarity even in unscripted moments – so if content needs to be corrected, clarified, or taken down, actions can be taken quickly and consistently.”
At scale, brands need visibility into what is happening on streams. That typically includes capturing livestream recordings, generating transcripts, scanning for high-risk keywords, reviewing affiliate content, maintaining audit trails of training and corrections. It’s not so much about policing creativity as it is about ensuring that real-time commerce can withstand regulatory scrutiny later.
“There have been situations where we needed to pull back or take down content,” shares Fathia Adam, “When there's an issue, we evaluate the content quickly – whether it is a factual issue, tone misalignment, value misalignment, or audience sensitivity. From there, we decide whether the content needs to be revised, clarified, paused, or taken down.” Elsa Maharani, senior head of strategic brand growth and influence at ParagonCorp adds, “We see creators as strategic partners who help make the brand message more relevant, credible, and naturally resonate within their communities.”
How brands monitor and manage livestreams
At present, brands and agencies are reliant on a combination of content marketing and social listening tools, analytics platforms, third-party applications like OBS Studio, and influencer management platforms, such as SeekArk, Kooler AI and Hiip for influencer discovery and performance analytics to match brands with the right content creators. This is also where AI supports with transcription, sentiment analysis, and keyword flagging. But real‑time moderation remains imperfect; livestreams can last for hours, hosts often improvise, and automated systems struggle to keep pace without human oversight.
James Baldwin, head of influence APAC at Ogilvy, explains: “Most brands, like the Unilevers and Coca-Colas of the world are not working with just a handful of influencers, but hundreds to thousands. And when you're talking about content of that volume, you can't [monitor content] manually.”
AI-powered platforms like Stickler capture livestreams, transcribe speech, analyse sentiment and flag spikes in negative reactions or compliance issues in real-time. But as Baldwin emphasises, “AI can do that at this stage, but we still say there should be some form of human guidance…there's always some fluidity in [working with influencers], but you also want them to have a structure so you can help manage [situations].”
“When you work in social, in a live environment, you never 100 percent know how an audience is going to react to anything…but you need to put the right processes in place to react. As long as you do the research, have the insights, and the right strategy in place – and as long as you're open and honest enough as a marketing and brand team – when something isn't working out, you can be agile enough to react to it and learn from it. But having the right processes in place is where it really starts.
While current tools on the market give marketers visibility into what is happening during a broadcast, these programs are designed for moderation rather than marketing.
Another layer of protection for brands is advertising. Just as brands had mastered programmatic advertising, the trend quickly shifted to social media, pushing adtech firms like DoubleVerify, to process high-volume, fast-moving content across diverse formats to develop solutions and expand the categories available to advertisers for greater control over the types of content that best fit their brands.
“We see the urgency," says Tinee Cruz, Manila-based senior business director at DoubleVerify, “Many of our clients are asking how they can better understand brand safety and suitability in fast-moving social formats, especially as it continues to grow. It's a newer and more complex environment for the industry overall, so the key question is how can advertisers make more informed decisions around where their brands appear.”
“Pre-bid and post-bid verifications help advertisers better understand brand suitability,” explains Cruz, “Our solutions are powered by Universal Content Intelligence™, our proprietary classification technology. It analyses multiple content signals, including video, image, audio, speech, text, and link elements. This helps advertisers classify content at scale and make informed decisions across [different] formats.” However, these formats do not yet include live streams.
The road ahead
Brands today integrate platform‑native tools with moderation systems, influencer management programs, and analytics dashboards, while also developing proprietary frameworks. Yet protection on fast‑moving platforms remains fragmented and boundaries between livestream formats – entertainment, commerce, influencer content, and even corporate broadcasts – making it not only difficult to monitor at scale in real-time but also for brands to determine placement suitability for their ads.
Current tools provide essential guardrails, but they are still a work in progress. As live commerce accelerates, the urgency will only grow – and so will innovation. The industry is steadily building toward solutions that can keep pace and allow for both creativity, authenticity and accountability to thrive in live commerce spaces. Until then, balancing authenticity, responsibility and trust with speed remains a challenge.
