- Essays··8 min read
Singapore Checks Who Pays for the Ad
Singapore's ad-verification reforms—requiring platforms to check who is paying for an ad, not just who appears in it—represent the correct control point against scam advertising, but one that arrives late. The shift from face-recognition filters to advertiser identity checks matters because evasion of the latter costs something per account; evasion of the former costs nothing. The open question is whether scam spend will simply re-aim at jurisdictions where the buying desk still asks nothing.
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Emtek's 30 Percent and Indonesia's Ad Curve
Emtek's reported 30 per cent production cost cut is best read against Indonesia's digital-advertising curve — a US$10.7 billion market at 9.4 per cent annual growth — not its streaming subscriber count. The surplus flows into a wider slate and a leaner staffing plan. Against a base rate where 95 per cent of enterprise generative-AI deployments yield no measurable P&L return, Emtek fits the outlier profile — and the risk belongs to any broadcaster copying the deal.
indonesiagenerative-aidigital-advertisingmedia-productionRead - Essays··8 min read
What Naver Filed the Week Seoul Named the Portals
Two Korean laws that took force within months of each other are not the same law, and reading them as one will trip on the seam. The revised Network Act names eight platforms, Naver, Kakao, Google and Meta among them, and requires half-yearly transparency reports on content moderation. The AI Basic Act separately demands visible labels on AI-generated advertisements. The result for ad buyers is two regulators, two ledgers, one ad.
ai-regulationkoreadigital-advertisingplatform-governanceRead - Essays··8 min read
Baidu's Q1 2026 Is Two Companies in One Filing
Baidu's Q1 2026 filing contains two businesses moving in opposite directions: AI Cloud revenue up 49%, online advertising down 21% year on year. This is a structural argument about what happens to search-driven ad economics once AI answers resolve queries before a sponsored result ever loads, rather than a Baidu-specific execution story. The ad line, this piece argues, will structurally undershoot its pre-transition trend for years instead of stabilising at a lower base.
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