Marketing Today

The walled gardens offer scale and rich engagement, but for marketers, they also create a constant give-and-take between performance, protection and efficiency. Any missteps in these environments can result in missed audiences, wasted spend and potential risks to the brand.  The question is no longer whether to invest in walled gardens, but how to maximize every dollar.

In 2026, much of commerce is decided before a consumer consciously makes a choice. Ranking algorithms, recommendation engines, and AI agents determine which products are surfaced, compared, and considered. Marketing increasingly operates inside those systems. Across APAC’s marketplaces and Retail Media Networks (RMNs), commerce environments are becoming machine-governed ecosystems where exposure, optimization, and transaction occur

In 2026, the creative constraint facing brands is no longer production, it is coherence. Generative AI has removed the friction that once governed creative scale. Brands can now produce thousands of variants across formats, languages, retail environments, and audience segments in minutes. Campaigns can now be adjusted dynamically, assets can be regenerated for new contexts

Having traversed many goal posts in its relatively short life, MMA has been successful in building relevance, resilience, and readiness in the local Indonesian market. It has done so while keeping pace with the global marketing transformation and also actively helping define it. The industry body has established itself as the most definitive mouthpiece for the marketing fraternity in the bustling Indonesian consumer landscape, under the leadership of its dynamic country head, Shanti Tolani.  In this interview with

Three shifts that redefine where marketing value is created—and why speed alone isn’t enough  AI isn’t changing marketing because it can generate more content.  It’s changing marketing because it’s removing friction from how decisions are made.  Consumer signals now move continuously. Intent shifts. Performance updates. Creative resonates or fails. Commerce outcomes materialize—all in near real time.  Yet most marketing organizations still operate on episodic