In the last few weeks, I've had roughly twelve conversations with APAC marketing leaders — brand managers, commercial leads, heads of performance — who are somewhere in the middle of their 9.9 planning.

Different brands. Different categories. Different budget sizes. But the same three worries keep coming up in every conversation, usually toward the end, usually in a lower voice than the rest of the meeting.

Nobody is saying these things in the planning room. But they're in the room. This piece is for the APAC marketing 9.9 2026 planning season — not to tell you whether you're right to be worried, but to name what you're probably sensing and say out loud what the structural reason behind it is.

"I think we're planning the wrong campaign."

The 2026 9.9 deck looks right because the templates used to write it are 2025 templates. The way 9.9 is actually won has changed in twelve months — but the deck still anchors on assumptions the platform will optimise away from on day three.

This worry usually surfaces as: "The brief is locked but I keep wondering if we're solving last year's problem." It feels like intuition. It's actually pattern recognition — the person saying it has picked up on a disconnect they haven't fully named yet.

Here's what they've picked up on: the deck template they used to write this 9.9 plan was designed for a 9.9 that existed twelve months ago. It has fields for creative, media mix, influencer, platform spend, audience targeting. All the right categories. But the assumptions baked into each one are 2025 assumptions.

The media mix section assumes the brand is deciding where spend goes. Shopee's and Lazada's ad engines are now making those decisions in real time using signals the brand can't see in its own dashboard. The audience targeting section assumes last year's lookalikes still work. The AI targeting layer on Meta and TikTok has redrawn those models in twelve months. The creative section has space for three hero creatives. Brands running AI creative workflows are testing forty variants and scaling the winner before day three.

The intuition is right. The campaign planning template needs to be updated for 2026 9.9 — not the strategy, not the channels, the planning template. This is the most fixable of the three worries. It takes a half-day to rebuild the template assumptions and reframe what the agency is being asked to optimise for.

"I don't actually know what 'AI' means in our 9.9 plan."

AI inside a 9.9 plan is at least four separate things — platform optimisation, creative pipeline, customer intelligence, and conversational layer. Most decks fold all four into a single bullet. The brands quietly winning 9.9 know which of the four they're investing in, and which they're consciously not.

This worry usually comes out as: "We have an AI workstream but I can't explain what it's actually doing." Which is an honest statement, because most AI workstreams in 9.9 decks are not workstreams — they're a line item.

The problem is that "AI" in a 9.9 plan is actually four different things, each of which requires a different investment, a different owner, and a different lead time to build:

Platform AI — the optimisation algorithms inside Shopee, Lazada, Meta, and TikTok Shop. This AI is already running. What the brand controls is how it briefs the platform: objectives, constraints, creative inputs. Most brands haven't updated how they brief the platform since the platform's AI changed. This is the easiest layer to address.

Creative pipeline AI — AI used to generate creative variants, copy, and assets at volume. Requires workflow setup, brand training, and integration with the production process. Lead time: four to six weeks from cold start.

The customer-data layer — AI applied to first-party data: purchase history, LTV segmentation, churn signals, campaign response patterns. This layer tells the team which audiences to prioritise, which SKUs to push, and which customers to recover. Lead time: six to eight weeks if first-party data needs to be cleaned and structured first.

The conversational layer — AI handling the customer conversation at peak hours: WhatsApp, Shopee chat, Lazada chat. This is conversation commerce — the buying decision happening inside the chat thread, not on the product page. Lead time: four to eight weeks depending on how many SKUs the AI needs to know and how much tone-of-voice training is required.

When a 9.9 AI workstream doesn't have a clear answer for which of these four it's addressing, it's usually addressing none of them properly. The fix is to split the single AI bullet into four rows and assign a status — investing, not investing, or in progress — to each. That conversation usually takes ninety minutes and produces a cleaner plan.

"The team isn't built for what 9.9 looks like now."

Most APAC marketing teams were hired for a 9.9 that no longer exists. The fix isn't more headcount — it's a parallel team for the AI layer running alongside the marketing agency, letting the in-house team focus on brand, strategy, and judgement.

This is the hardest worry to say out loud because it can sound like a critique of the team. It isn't. It's a structural observation about what the team was designed to do.

The 2025 APAC D2C marketing team was typically structured like this: a brand or marketing lead, a performance or media manager, a content or creative lead, and a customer service or support team. Sometimes a CRM or lifecycle lead. Outsourced to a marketing agency for creative and media execution, sometimes a separate influencer agency.

That team is good at what it was designed for. But here's what it wasn't designed for: nobody owns AI creative workflows, nobody is making sense of first-party customer data fast enough to inform a brief, the chat function is staffed for complaint resolution not for selling, there's no one who can brief the platform's AI algorithm as a strategic partner, and the creative team is built to produce one hero asset per channel, not forty variants for a testing loop.

This is not a budget problem. Brands with large marketing teams have it too. It's a team-shape problem — the team is the right size, it's just shaped for 2025.

The brands handling this best in 2026 9.9 campaign planning aren't rebuilding the team in twelve weeks before September. They're bringing in a parallel team for the AI layer — a tech partner running alongside the marketing agency — and letting the in-house team do what it does well: brand, strategy, agency relationships, and commercial judgement. The in-house team keeps the plan. The tech partner builds the infrastructure underneath it.

What these three worries have in common

None of these worries are about execution capability. The APAC marketing leaders having them are experienced. They've run 9.9 before. They know how to execute a campaign.

What they're picking up on is a structural mismatch between the templates they're using and the environment they're operating in. The templates are 2025. The environment moved in twelve months.

The first worry is about the plan not reflecting 2026 reality. The second is about the plan not having enough clarity about where AI is actually doing work. The third is about the team not being shaped for what the new plan requires.

Together, they're pointing at the same thing: the gap between last year's operating model and what the 2026 9.9 marketing plan actually needs to run well. That gap is closable. The brands that close it in May and June will run a structurally different 9.9 than the ones that don't. Most brands lock their plan by mid-July. That's the window.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's coming next

Over the next few weeks I'll be publishing a few more pieces on this — what A.I creative pilots actually look like in practice, what marketing intelligence means once it's set up properly, and a longer piece on conversation commerce specifically (because it deserves its own treatment, not a paragraph).

If you're a brand running on Shopee, Lazada, or D2C in APAC and any of this is hitting somewhere — these pieces are written for you.

Follow me here for the next pieces. Or read the full version on reddot.solutions.