A combination of digital risks driven by new technologies and the evolving regulatory landscape in Asia is forcing advertisers, marketing, and brand safety teams to pivot.
We talk to experts with on-ground experience to get the ‘need-to-knows’ for any company operating in the region. From AI risks to bad bots, fake traffic, adjacency, fraud, and compliance: this is the state of brand safety in Asia today.
Key Takeaways
- Fake traffic and AI-driven fraud are rising fast in Southeast Asia, distorting engagement signals and spiking during major news or political events.
- AI and digital regulations are accelerating across Asia but remain highly fragmented, requiring brands to tailor compliance and safety strategies country by country.
- Experts say companies must shift from detection to verification, using their own AI to validate environments and supply paths before spending ad dollars.
- Language diversity, hyperactive social media use, and rapid synthetic content make adjacency, misplacement, and brand safety risks uniquely challenging in the region.
Top Priorities for South East Asia Ad, Marketing, and Brand Safety Teams
As AI tech giants, like Google, announce new measures to fight fake traffic with AI, digital safety laws in Asian countries are tightening up. Recently, China amended its Cybersecurity Law to include new measures for the monitoring of the use of AI, including higher penalties for those who breach the law. China is not the only country in Asia enacting new obligations on data use and AI. Despite new laws emerging in Singapore, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and other countries, fake traffic and fraud is not slowing down.
Fake traffic is an important issue for companies operating in Southeast Asia, Jigyasa Grover, former Google Developer Advisory Board (gDAB) Member, Google Developer Expert (GDE), and currently Machine Learning Engineer at Uber, told us. “It’s not just bots inflating impressions,” Grover said. “With fast mobile adoption, uneven regulatory frameworks, and huge creator-led content ecosystems, fraud can hide really easily.”Despite fake traffic and connected fraud operations being a priority for businesses, Grover explained that the region is volatile rather than consistently high-risk or low-risk. “Fraud patterns shift quickly with political events, national news, or platform changes,” said Grover.
For example, Indonesia or the Philippines can go from calm to “seasonally explosive” during election weeks or breaking news. The obvious for companies running brand awareness, marketing or ads in the region is wasted ad spend. But the bigger problem is how it distorts data and signals. “Fraudsters are using AI to imitate human behavior, scroll patterns, micro-engagement, even dwell time, so it’s harder to know what’s real,” Grover said. “I’ve seen cases where publishers generate hyper-local content like ‘best cafés in Kuala Lumpur’ purely to farm traffic, then recycle it across multiple shell domains,” Grover explained.
“On the surface, it looks real, but most engagement is artificial,” said Grover.
Navigating a Defragmented Regional Regulation Landscape
While China is pushing the hardest with rules to fight deep fakes, AI, and data abuse — pulling ad platforms into strict labeling, logging, and liability — Singapore is also building toolkits and voluntary codes, Nic Adams, CEO of 0rcus.com, an AI cybersecurity firm, told us. Meanwhile, Japan and South Korea are moving through framework laws and guidelines that link AI, data protection, and sector rules, which raise the bar for adtech and brand platforms that operate across borders, said Adams.
“AI governance in Asia is accelerating, but unevenly,” Mary Sahagun, Founder of TargetLink, Singapore-based PR and Communications Strategist, told us. China is moving fast with strict transparency rules, while Singapore, Japan, and South Korea rely more on adaptable frameworks, Sahagun said. The different rules and regulations across the region are not only a challenge for companies to navigate. They are a business risk.
Companies should not run a single “Asia” playbook, Adams said. China, India, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia all differ on rules, dominant platforms, and fraud patterns, said Adams. ‘Before Spending a Dollar’ on Ads: Mitigating AI Risks To navigate Southeast Asia's evolving compliance and the risks that emerge as AI advances in the region, Grover said that companies need to shift their mindset from detection to verification.
“Detection reacts after the fact,” said Grover. “Verification makes sure the environment is clean before you even spend a dollar.” For Grover, the solution is to fight fire with fire. To mitigate the risks of advancing AI technologies in Asia being abused by bad actors, companies must develop their own AI. “Since fraudsters now use AI to simulate users, brands need their own AI to spot deeper signals, latency quirks, fingerprints, attention metrics, and stuff humans can’t easily flag,” said Grover.
“You also have to treat each SEA country as its own micro-market,” she said. Compliance, cultural norms, and enforcement vary a lot between Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, said Grover. “The companies that do this well adapt their brand safety playbooks for each country rather than using a single regional approach,” Grover added.
Adjacencies, Misplacements, Language Diversity, and Social Media AI
“Fake traffic is the biggest issue,” Sophia Shvets, Senior Data Scientist at NinjaTech AI, a Palo Alto, California company, founded by former Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) employees, told us. Markets like Indonesia and Vietnam grew so fast that fraud tools never fully caught up, Shvets said. Language diversity and cultural barriers are also making brand safety messy, she explained. “The region has hundreds of languages and dialects, and most safety tools were built for English,” said Shvets. “A lot of risky content just slips through because the systems literally don’t understand it.”
This includes fake reviews, AI-made influencers, and deepfakes.
“South East Asia is extremely active on social media, so these things spread fast and can mess up brand campaigns quickly,” said Shvets. Companies in SEA are starting to build their own small AI tools to double-check platform numbers instead of relying only on Google, she said. Using AI models that have been trained and run on data aligned with the region, applying appropriate content classification and language filters to capture homegrown dialects, and creating simple pathways for disengagement when AI detects politically sensitive issues or other content that sits within a gray area are other measures to consider, Labunski said. Technologies that assist in the region also include AI-driven local language contextual analysis that understands cultural nuance, pre-bid brand safety and suitability filters integrated at the DSP level, and verification tools that scan pages frame by frame to avoid inaccurate adjacencies.
Brands should also run crisis simulations, Aaron Henry, Founder and Managing Director at Foundeast Asia Co., Ltd, told us. These include exercises to simulations such as “What if a fake CEO video appears on TikTok Thailand?” or “What if our chatbot gives non-compliant advice to customers in Japan?” “Test your escalation chain, not just your policies on paper,” said Henry.
The Bottom Line
As Grover explained, Southeast Asia is definitely one of the fastest-moving digital markets in the world. With that pace comes a constant cat-and-mouse game; marketers use AI to improve targeting, bad actors use AI to evade it. The brands that do well are the ones that invest in clean data, transparent supply chains, and real-time verification instead of relying on post-campaign checks.