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Thought Leaders in association withLBB Events
APAC’s Fandoms Aren’t Waiting for Brands to Catch Up
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06/08/2026
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Dan Pantumsinchai, managing director, gaming and entertainment at dentsu APAC says “The question isn’t whether brands should participate – it’s whether they’ll still be relevant if they don’t”
A few months ago, a client asked me why they should be investing in entertainment partnerships. I told them the question isn’t whether brands should participate – it’s whether they’ll still be relevant if they don’t.
Entertainment content is a whole ecosystem, not just a channel. Across APAC, consumers aren’t simply watching content – they’re travelling to conventions, binging micro-drama content, buying fandom merchandise, joining creator communities, spending hours inside gaming platforms, and turning cultural moments into commerce.
Media, retail, sponsorship, gaming, live experiences and creators were once separate categories, but now they’ve collapsed into a single ecosystem powered by participation.
Yet many brands still plan these worlds separately. That’s becoming a problem, because consumers don’t experience fandom through organisational charts. They move seamlessly from a concert to a livestream, from a creator recommendation to a purchase, from a game to a community. Increasingly, that’s where attention, influence and spending are also flowing.
Consider the signals. Our recent entertainment spotlight as part of dentsu’s ‘APAC Consumer Navigator’ research shows 32% of APAC consumers now watch micro-dramas – a format still barely registering in most Western markets. And 41% say they’re more likely to buy a product or service featured in a podcast or radio programme they follow. These aren’t isolated behaviours, but evidence that trust, not reach, is now the currency that converts.
And if you’ve been paying attention to gaming, none of this should come as a surprise. Gaming got there first.
For years, gaming has been demonstrating what participation-led entertainment looks like. Communities are built around creators rather than publishers, audiences move fluidly across platforms, and commerce is embedded into the experience rather than bolted on afterwards. The audience doesn’t just watch, it contributes.
This is why APAC’s role in gaming matters so much.
While growth across several mature Western gaming markets has largely plateaued in recent years, much of the industry’s momentum is now being driven by Asia, particularly China and Southeast Asia.
The most recent example of this is the breakout success of Japan-developed indie title ‘Meccha Chameleon’, which surpassed 15 million copies sold in its first month. Its rapid rise reflects several of the industry’s most powerful trends: highly shareable, streamer-friendly gameplay that generates organic discovery across platforms; strong community participation through user-generated content; and the increasing impact of word-of-mouth marketing in an era where creators and players often drive adoption more effectively than traditional advertising. Much like a similar indie sensation that came before it in ‘Among Us’, brand collaborations and IP expansion are almost sure to follow.
If your organisation doesn’t have a meaningful gaming strategy for APAC, you’re not simply missing a large audience, you’re opting out of one of the industry’s most important growth engines.
The evolution of gaming platforms should also be a wake-up call for marketers. Mobile remains dominant across the region, but PC gaming is growing rapidly and the advertising and partnership infrastructure that once existed primarily on mobile is increasingly extending across the broader ecosystem. That creates scalable ways to connect with highly engaged audiences that were previously difficult to reach.
And then there’s Roblox which is essentially its own standalone category. At this point, debating whether platforms like it deserve a place in a marketing strategy misses the bigger point entirely. APAC leads the world in both engagement and growth on these immersive platforms, but the underlying shift matters more than any single platform.
Younger audiences increasingly expect brands to show up inside the environments where they spend their time, rather than interrupt them from the outside.
When I travelled to the Roblox Developer Conference in Bangkok a few months ago, I experienced first-hand the energy, excitement, and most importantly youthfulness of the Roblox community. Interviews with the top creators almost always started with them mentioning their age as a badge of honour – many of them in their early twenties, and some in their teens. These creators started as players themselves and now pull in millions of dollars monthly, serving as inspirational beacons to an even younger crowd of players. This is where the youth are spending their time and dreaming of their future.
The behavioural gap between generations isn’t a difference in preference anymore but an entirely different operating system. Gen z will subscribe to a streaming service solely to watch a particular title and cancel as soon as they’re finished. Many have abandoned physical media altogether and a meaningful share won’t pay full price for a game. Yet this audience is deeply loyal to the creators, characters, franchises and communities that consistently deliver value.
Loyalty hasn’t disappeared; it’s just stopped being owed by default.
This is where many brands still get fandom wrong: they focus on visibility when they should be focusing on participation. Dentsu’s global ‘Fandom Intelligence’ research found that the right entertainment partnerships convert fans into buyers at rates two to four times higher than even major sports sponsorships. Streaming-led IP in particular is outperforming category norms on awareness and favourability. That isn’t a branding story, but rather a business story. Yet too many partnerships still run on an outdated formula: place a logo on an asset, launch a limited-edition product, and hope fandom does the rest.
The brands that win over the next 12 months won’t be the ones with the biggest media budgets. They’ll be the ones who understand which fandoms matter, which platforms genuinely carry influence, and what a community that’s already good at spotting the difference between participation and opportunism will actually reward.
APAC’s fandoms aren’t waiting for brands to catch up, they’re already deciding who gets invited into the conversation.
Thought Leaders in association withLBB Events
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