What does it take to run effective regional communications across Southeast Asia?

Can one agency manage communications across Southeast Asia?

Yes - but only if its local teams are structured to work together, with a regional operating model that lets them share knowledge, talent, and resources across borders.

I’ve spent two decades working across Southeast Asia, both in-house and within agency networks, and I’ve seen how easily a regional model can become fragmented. 

Different markets may have their own priorities, targets and commercial pressures. 

But none of that should become the client’s problem. Clients care about getting the best people on their business and achieving the results they hired us to deliver.

As an agency, it’s our job to manage the complexity behind a regional account.

However, I’ve seen offices within the same agency network compete over resources and revenue, leaving clients to coordinate teams that were supposed to be working as one.

This isn't a challenge unique to network agencies, nor does it mean independent agencies automatically collaborate better. What matters is how teams are structured and incentivised to work together.

If a client hires one regional agency, they should get one regional team.

The question isn’t simply whether an agency has offices across Southeast Asia. It’s whether those offices are actually built and incentivised to deliver results by working together.

What should brands look for in a regional communications agency?

When choosing a regional communications agency in Southeast Asia, brands should look beyond its footprint. I would consider five things:

1. Proven local-market expertise: The people advising you should understand the market, not simply be executing a regional playbook.
2. A structure that encourages collaboration: Teams should be able to share talent, knowledge and resources across borders.
3. Strong regional coordination: Local insights need to make their way into regional strategy—and local teams should help shape it.
4. Flexibility to scale: The agency should be able to support new markets or capabilities as the business evolves.
5. Honesty about its limitations: Sometimes another local or specialist agency will be better placed to do the work. A good partner should be willing to say so.

An agency’s internal structure can affect the work clients receive in ways they may never see.

One challenge I’ve encountered previously is that individual market offices can have their own targets, priorities and P&Ls. Without the right incentives for collaboration,  a simple question - who is the best person for this job? -can become tangled up with another one: which market gets the revenue?

Clients shouldn't have to care about that. They should know they have the right people behind their business, focused on delivering the best results.

At Mutant, we operate with one P&L across our business. This gives us a shared commercial interest in our clients’ success. If an account led from one market needs expertise sitting elsewhere, we can bring in the right people based on the work, rather than having individual market revenue targets dictate how we allocate resources. For example, when we won an Entertainment client when our Thailand office was new, we flew some Mutants from Malaysia (who have worked on the account for five years) down to our first Bangkok media event. This delighted our client, who enjoyed deeper expertise while our new Thai members learnt the ropes quickly. 

Can one regional strategy work across Southeast Asia?

Yes, but one strategy doesn’t mean one execution.

Southeast Asia is a whole region, not a single market. A brand can have one regional strategy: a shared objective, positioning, and story. What it can't have is a single playbook for delivering it, because brands are often at completely different stages from one country to the next.

 How that strategy is delivered will differ based on:

• Market maturity: A brand might need category education in one country and consideration or preference-building in another.
• Culture and language: An idea that feels intuitive in one market can be misunderstood in another.
• Media landscapes: Each market has its own media environment, journalist priorities and appetite for different stories.
• Platforms and creators: How audiences discover and engage with brands isn't uniform across the region.
• Business objectives: Different markets may be trying to solve different problems. One may be focused on driving revenue or improving profitability, while another is still building brand awareness.

This is why localisation should start much earlier than translating copy or swapping campaign assets.

On our regional accounts, local market leads join the conversation to share what they are seeing on the ground, sense-check assumptions, and identify where an idea needs to change. Sometimes their role is also to tell us,and the client,that something simply isn't going to work.

Agencies need to be comfortable doing that. Our reputation is tied to our clients’ reputation, and executing something we believe could be misconstrued locally doesn't help either of us.

The goal is a consistent regional direction that reflects what works in each market.

How can you tell if a regional agency actually works as one team?

A regional agency only creates efficiency if its people actually act like one team.

One benefit of consolidation is that clients have fewer agency relationships to manage. But that advantage disappears if the client becomes responsible for connecting separate offices, passing information between teams, and making sure everybody is aligned.

For our regional accounts, we hold regular cross-market chats so local teams can share insights, challenges, and opportunities. We also move expertise across markets and scale support as a client's needs change.

For example, a client might want to test activity in Indonesia before committing to a larger programme. If the right people and infrastructure are already available within the regional team, they can test those deliverables without immediately having to build an entirely new agency relationship.

We have also intentionally built our leadership team across Southeast Asia rather than treating “regional” as synonymous with being based in Singapore. 

We brought leaders from across our markets and disciplines together at our recent Directors’ Offsite. Having different perspectives helps make regional decisions with a better understanding of what teams and clients are seeing on the ground.

For me, one of the clearest signs that this approach works is when clients continue to grow with us.

Clients including Jobstreet and companies across healthcare and technology have expanded their work with us as their needs across markets and disciplines have changed. Several of our multinational client relationships have now lasted the better part of a decade, or longer. 

How can a mix of agency models support regional communications?

“One agency” shouldn't become another way of saying “one size fits all.”

A regional agency may not be the best option when it lacks deep expertise in a priority market, when the brief requires specialist capabilities, or when a hub-and-spoke model would give the brand stronger support.

One of our clients, for instance, was keen on hiring us to lead communications across a wider APAC remit that included China, Australia and New Zealand. We were upfront that our own offices and deepest market expertise were concentrated in Southeast Asia. Instead of claiming capabilities we didn't have, we offered to source and work with agency partners in those markets.

Three years later, we remain their trusted agency partner.

The same principle applies to specialist capabilities. We frequently work alongside our clients’ creative, advertising and production agencies, because the priority is finding the right mix of expertise to deliver the best outcome for the client

We recently joined a regional workshop with Scoot and its other marketing agency partners. Hearing from specialists across disciplines helped us understand one another’s strengths and think about integrated campaigns together from the start, rather than trying to stitch separate pieces together at the end.

Good integration doesn't always require consolidation. Sometimes it requires agencies that know how to collaborate and do it well.

One regional agency or multiple local agencies: how should brands decide?

There isn't one model that works for every business.

Before appointing one agency across Southeast Asia, I would ask a few questions:

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1. Does the agency have genuine local expertise in the markets that matter to us?
2. How do its market teams share people, knowledge and resources?
3. Will local experts have a meaningful role in shaping our regional strategy?
4. Can the agency scale with us if we enter another market or need a different capability?
5. And when it doesn't have the expertise we need, will it tell us?

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One agency can, indeed,  support communications across Southeast Asia -only if it has the local expertise, structure and flexibility to deliver across markets without passing the complexity back to the client.

Where that expertise doesn't exist, a local partner or specialist agency may be the better choice.

Ultimately, the right agency model should make regional communications easier for the client, not give them more teams to manage.

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