Insights · Channels
Digital advertising channels in Vietnam, and how to choose between them
There is no best channel. There is a channel that fits how your customers decide.
Short answer
Channel choice in Vietnam should start from how your category is bought, not from which platform is growing fastest. Low-price, impulse-led categories are discovered in social and video feeds and bought inside marketplaces. Considered, higher-value purchases need channels that catch demand at the moment someone is actively looking, and a way to stay in contact across a longer decision. Most brands need both, so the real question is the split.
What is genuinely different here
Four things a team arriving from another market tends to get wrong on the first pass.
Discovery often starts inside a marketplace
For many consumer categories the journey begins on Shopee, Lazada or TikTok Shop rather than on a search engine. A plan structured around search intent can be well built and still aimed at the wrong step.
Video-led discovery is mainstream
Short video and live selling are ordinary purchase paths here, not experiments. They behave like discovery channels, which means they get undercredited by last-click reporting.
Zalo is infrastructure, not a side channel
It is where a large share of conversation and repeat contact happens. Treating it as one more broadcast channel misses what it is actually good for.
The close often happens in chat
Which means the channel that started the conversation records a click and nothing else. Channels that close on a website will always look stronger until this is connected.
Three questions that shorten the list
Does the customer know what they want before seeing an ad?
If yes, capture demand where they search. If no, the product has to reach them, and discovery channels carry the weight.
How long is the decision?
A one-minute purchase and a three-week consideration need different channel mixes, and the second needs something that holds contact in between.
Where does the purchase complete?
Website, marketplace, chat thread or physical store. That answer determines what is measurable, and anything unmeasured will look weaker than it is.
Articles in this cluster
Vietnam’s advertising law in 2026: the rules that change a foreign brand’s launch plan
Vietnam rewrote its advertising rules in four texts over twelve months. Most coverage stops at the five-second rule for video ads. The rules that change a launch plan are elsewhere.
Influencer marketing in Vietnam: KOLs, KOCs, and what a foreign brand is actually paying for
The proposal says “three KOLs and fifty KOCs”. What it does not say is what the brand will own, and what it will be able to check, once the posts are up.
Affiliate marketing in Vietnam: how brands pay for sales, and what a commission report does not show
An affiliate programme reports a low cost per order almost by construction. The number that matters is how many of those orders would not have happened without it.
Zalo for business: what it is for, and when it earns a budget line
Most channel plans list Zalo next to Facebook and TikTok. It does a different job from both, and the question of who holds the account matters more than the budget line.
Is Facebook still the main channel in Vietnam?
Facebook still reaches almost everyone online in Vietnam. That settles less than it seems, because reach is no longer the question a channel plan has to answer.
Which digital channels matter in Vietnam
A plan translated from another market can be executed perfectly and still point at the wrong step of the journey.
Common questions
Do global campaign assets work in Vietnam?
The global identity travels; the finished assets rarely do. Ads in Vietnam must carry their content in Vietnamese, with foreign text at most three quarters its size, so a global key visual needs local versions anyway. Short video and live selling also reward local faces and a steady flow of new material. Keep the global identity and produce locally the assets that have to perform.
How long before a new channel in Vietnam can be judged?
Longer than the first month, and by volume rather than by calendar. A new channel needs enough orders or qualified leads at a steady budget for the result to stand out from ordinary monthly swings, which for most brands means eight to twelve weeks. Decide the budget, the period and the stopping rule before starting, and judge on orders in your own records.
How should we split budget across channels?
Start from where the purchase completes and work backwards, rather than splitting by platform popularity. Then fix attribution before optimising the split, because a split optimised on last-click data will steadily move money away from whatever starts the journey.
Does MWY buy media?
No. MWY runs no campaigns, produces no content, and takes no commission from any platform or agency. The work is helping choose the mix against how your category is bought, getting measurement right first, and reading results back each month.
Deciding where the budget should go?
Month one of Advisory & Oversight is an audit that examines measurement first, because a channel decision taken on wrong data is wrong in a very reasonable-looking way. The first thirty minutes are free.