It is a paradox at the heart of modern social media marketing that as spend climbs to record levels, many brands simultaneously post more content and capture less attention. Global social media marketing expenditure reached $276.7 billion in 2025, according to Vista Social, yet the volume of content competing for every second of consumer attention has never been greater. In that environment, the question of what you spend matters as much as how much you spend.
Of all content formats, short-form video now delivers the highest ROI: 71% of marketers surveyed by Statista ranked it first, ahead of long-form video at 22% and live video at 6%. Many brands treat paid and organic social as two parallel, equally weighted workstreams. Some 75% of marketing leaders now rank them as equal strategic priorities, according to Sprout Social’s 2025 Index.
Meanwhile, the brands that combine organic and paid in sequence see faster lead generation and higher conversion rates than those running ads without organic integration, says VaynerMedia’s international president Marcus Krzastek.
In a recent visit to Singapore, Krzastek sat down with Campaign Asia-Pacific to explain where brands are losing money and how to stop it.
The creative accountability gap
“A lot of strong media budget gets spent against creative that doesn’t actually deliver results. The creative simply isn’t good enough to justify the spend behind it,” he says. A brand can have sophisticated targeting, a generous media budget, and a well-structured campaign architecture and still underperform, simply because the creative at the centre of it hasn’t earned the right to be amplified. Krzastek’s prescription is to close that accountability gap before a single dollar of paid spend is committed.
Krzastek believes that organic content should be prioritised as a creative testing ground that signals what platforms and content are worth investing spend on. “When we look at the creative that earned more organic distribution, we’re taking advantage of those algorithms,” he notes. “This tells us we have something that actually captures attention.”
When a brand posts organically, the platform rewards content that captures attention with more distribution and penalises content that doesn't gain traction, Krzastek observes. Validated creative then moves into paid and runs directly against untested assets in the same ad set.
"The biggest issue most brands face is they don't have enough winning organic assets to fuel all the efficiency they could be getting from their media spend," he explains. "Building that volume requires more than production cadence. It requires understanding what the platform is rewarding at any given moment."
In practice, this means investing in a content engine that is less production-house and more listening post, one that is tuned to the rhythms of platform culture, subculture, and the ever-shifting terrain of consumer attention.
The brands winning organic distribution, says Krzastek, are not the ones with the biggest production budgets, but rather those who know exactly what their consumers are paying attention to online. “The underlying consumer ecosystem that sits beneath any platform’s algorithm is really the aggregation of sub-communities, subcultures, trends, and topics,” he observes. “What’s been useful for brands in the region is building a deep and nuanced understanding of the different cultures and cohorts in the markets they want to reach.”
Day trading attention
Knowing which creative earns organic distribution requires active platform management, which Krzastek describes as "almost like day trading." What worked six months ago in terms of content may not work today, he observes. TikTok's organic engagement rate sits at 2.5%—the highest of any major platform—while Facebook's has declined to the point where organic reach is marginal for most brands, according to Emplicit's TikTok Engagement Rate Benchmarks 2025.
Platform algorithms are constantly in flux and reflect the aggregated, evolving behaviour of their users, especially in Southeast Asia, where cultural shifts are rapid and consumer ecosystems differ across markets, Krzastek notes.
"It is fascinating how quickly what is rewarded with more or less distribution changes," he says. "The supply and demand of attention shifts constantly, and the formats platforms want to prioritise do to. Even the narrative structures that earn reach today may not earn it tomorrow."
When creative becomes targeting
As Meta and TikTok have moved toward broader, privacy-safe audience models, advertiser-defined targeting has narrowed. When targeting precision declines, creative quality has become the primary driver when it comes to organic content.
For example, Meta's algorithm now evaluates visual elements, video pacing, watch time, and engagement behaviour to determine who sees a given ad. In Southeast Asia, the brands producing the most culturally relevant organic content are winning reach and, in turn, training the platform's algorithm on exactly who their audience is.
"Creative can do a lot of the heavy lifting from a targeting standpoint," says Krzastek. "When you give media platforms the objectives you want to deliver against, the large language models (LLMs) targeting capabilities of those platforms can actually read the creative cues and use them to find the right people."
The future of organic social and how consumers discover is increasingly being influenced by language learning models. Notably, short-form content built for social reach is now simultaneously being indexed as an answer to search queries. Google AI Overviews currently appear in approximately 13% of all Google searches, up from under 5% during the 2025 limited rollout, and are projected to cover 20–25% of all queries by the end of 2026, according to Digital Applied.
The implication for brands is significant: organic creative no longer just makes paid spend more efficient, but also more likely to appear where consumers are actively looking for answers online.
In 2025, Google extended AI Overviews to 200 countries and 40 languages, making the feature key for marketers targeting multiple markets across Southeast Asia's fragmented media landscape. In addition, over half (56%) of marketers in the region already report gains in web traffic from AI-generated summaries, according to NP Digital's APAC report.
"One of the platforms we're really interested in for most clients to spend a little bit more time on is YouTube Shorts," says Krzastek. In Google's bid to further intertwine information between its various platforms, Gemini is pulling YouTube Shorts content directly into its responses, surfacing short-form video as a direct answer to consumer queries. A brand with a consistent Shorts presence is more likely to be indexed as a search result.
For brands operating across Southeast Asia, where Google remains the dominant search gateway even as TikTok and Instagram command social attention, this intersection of short-form social and AI search represents a rare early-mover advantage. The window to establish that presence before the space becomes crowded is, Krzastek implies, already closing.
Organic short-form content, validated by platform algorithms, amplified through paid, and now surfaced by AI search, is effectively doing multiple jobs at once: testing creative, targeting audiences, and generating search discovery. The brands building that system now are compounding an advantage that paid spend alone cannot replicate, Krzastek explains.
"Given what we're seeing in the space of generative engine optimisation, and specifically Shorts' connection to Gemini, we see real opportunity for clients to build generative engine optimisation into their day-to-day creative workflow," he adds. "Leaning into Shorts early is, for many clients, a genuinely smart move right now."
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
