Senior marketers, agency leaders, and analytics experts are rethinking how advertising budgets are spent in the Philippines, as a new industry study reveals widening gaps between media investment and actual return on investment.
At a closed-door forum convened by adobo Magazine, industry leaders examined how brands can make media spending work harder amid tightening budgets, declining television consumption, and growing pressure to prove measurable impact.
The discussion, themed “Every Peso Counts: Media that Works for Consumer Brands in the Philippines,” centered on how advertisers can adapt their media strategies to today’s fragmented and performance-driven environment.
At the heart of the conversation was a study by Analytic Edge, which introduced the concept of media sufficiency—investing at the level required for a channel to perform optimally, rather than spreading budgets thinly across multiple platforms.
As audience attention becomes more fragmented and traditional reach-based planning loses reliability, sufficiency is emerging as a critical discipline for driving real business outcomes.
Insights from the study were drawn from fresh Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) analyses across 11 FMCG brands in the Philippines, measuring how different media channels actually contribute to sales. The findings show a clear disconnect between where audiences are spending their time and where advertisers continue to allocate the bulk of their budgets.
Television viewership continues to decline, yet it still commands a dominant share of media spend. Meanwhile, short-form video platforms—particularly TikTok—have seen explosive growth. TikTok’s share of media spend has risen from just 1% to 17% over the past five years, reflecting a sharp shift toward mobile-first and short-form content consumption.
Despite this growth, the study found that advertiser investment has not always kept pace with performance. Across the modeled brands, TikTok delivered the highest ROI in around 70% of cases, generating average returns of approximately 2.2x—outperforming both traditional and other digital channels.
In the consumer packaged goods segment, TikTok recorded relative ROI levels of 2.42x and, in some comparisons, up to 4.7 times that of other media. In food and beverage, its ROI was about 1.7 times higher than total media.
Yet TikTok currently accounts for only about five to six percent of total FMCG media spend, suggesting significant under-allocation relative to its modeled contribution. According to the analysis, many brands are operating below sufficiency levels, particularly in high-impact, full-funnel digital channels.
For TikTok, optimal performance was observed when investment reached between 86% and 160% of current spend, indicating substantial headroom before diminishing returns set in. The study points to underinvestment—rather than channel inefficiency—as an increasingly common cause of lost ROI.
The research also explored how TikTok complements television rather than merely duplicating reach. Audience overlap between TikTok and linear TV was found to be around 48–49%, meaning more than half of TikTok’s reach extends beyond traditional TV viewers.
When both channels were used together, the modeling showed an incremental awareness lift of roughly 24.6%, underscoring the value of a thoughtfully integrated, sufficiency-led media mix.
Padmanabhan Ramaswamy, Managing Director for Southeast Asia at Analytic Edge, said the real challenge for brands lies not in identifying high-performing platforms, but in aligning budgets with modeled marginal returns. Legacy allocation habits, he noted, often no longer reflect how consumers actually consume media or which channels are driving incremental sales.
“What this study highlights is not simply which platform performs well, but whether budgets are aligned with modeled sales contribution,” Ramaswamy said. “Media sufficiency is about investing at the right scale so channels can deliver their full potential, rather than being underfunded and misunderstood.”
The findings challenge conservative allocation practices and reinforce the need for data-led planning in an increasingly complex media landscape. As marketing effectiveness faces closer scrutiny, the consensus from the session was clear: success will depend less on experimentation and more on sufficiency-based investment decisions grounded in robust analytics. These insights are expected to shape how advertisers and agencies refine their media strategies in the months ahead.