Dear Members,
There’s a Chinese proverb 众志成城, ‘when people are of one mind, they stand together as strong as a city wall.’ As the voice of the industry, every perspective shared in our Board and Council Meetings, research, Member Discussions, 1:1s becomes part of the trusted guidance we create to help businesses make business, budget and workforce decisions. And we’re making it even easier to be heard, starting with our new member hub; more on this below.
Our 2026 Boards and Councils are standing strong
As a registered non-profit, our lives would be so much easier if we accepted every Board and Council nomination. But in over a decade of running Councils, we have to do all we can to strike the right balance, so we invest in an independent selection process to get the best mix of perspectives, expertise and commitment. Our content surpassed 1 million views this past year, 24% of website traffic now comes from China, with the US at 20% and India at 18%. Last year’s CTV and OTT playbook reached 20,000 downloads within 24 hours of launch. We couldn’t possibly achieve this level of engagement without putting just as much thought and effort into who is on our Boards and Council, as they put into participating.
This year that balance means 61 Council Members and 19 Board Members from 35 companies across 9 countries, with an average of 15 years of experience; five founders, 13 engineering graduates, 17 MBAs, and career paths as diverse as this region, a mechanical engineer who now leads GenAI marketing, a marketer who grew an FMCG brand to US$100M and now leads commerce agency side. The additional layer of representing the service side of the digital ecosystem, as well as being competitors, partners and peers, the journey to reaching consensus on what we create is as interesting as what we create.
Our Strategic Advisory Board is here to support the Industry Leadership Board, who are also our Council Co-Leads, and at our first full-day board meeting the Co-Leads shared their Councils’ initial direction to pressure-test and refine altogether. All I can say for now is to expect a brilliant blend of interactive tools, myth busters and incredibly considered industry resources you can use. I love hearing stories from how our resources are used out in the wild, for example a CMO I’d never met pulled me aside recently at an event to tell me her team used our Measurement Maturity Framework at their APAC offsite, and to say thank you for simplifying the conversation.
Being part of our Boards and Councils is always a highlight for me; I leave every connect more informed, more inspired and constantly astounded at the talent our industry attracts. We’re only halfway through the Council term and there are already superstars standing out who we could see stepping up to Board roles in the future if they so desired; they have all the qualities we look for to help us set the industry agenda and guide what we create.
Our Councils are the strongest pathway to Board roles; three Strategic Advisory Board seats opened this term and each one went to a former Council member. One of the qualifying criteria we look for is prior engagement with us, whether on our Boards and Councils, or joining our portfolio of member events such as Tiffin Time networking, participating in our Member Discussions, sharing your perspective in our industry research, and connecting with fellow Members at our Members evening.
Our voice is getting louder
And engage so many of you did! Over 1,700 of you shared your perspectives on our recent Regional Regulatory Forecast 2026. When we began fieldwork, we could never have anticipated we would get a 15% response rate, especially for a rather long and very detailed multi market quant and qual survey on regulations (for context, research usually has a 1–3% response rate, even with incentives). We know people are desperate to be heard, and know we’re going to listen. Your responses were so rich, we were able to achieve multidimensional industry research which was impossible before.
Our Member Discussions are where you can contribute to the industry discussion live. Recently our members from across the ecosystem discussed and debated all things AI efficiency and brand building. One of my favourite quotes of the afternoon was from Mary Lau, Kantar: ‘Consumers are open to AI. But how it’s used, and how well it retains the soul of humans and the relevance to culture, becomes much more important.’ – such a beautiful way to capture the important role we all play. Full highlights will be shared soon! Every member is welcome at our Member Discussions, whether you are joining to speak, or to listen and learn, or both the choice is yours.
Launching our new Member Hub
We know how hard it can be to find insights, information and inspiration from this region, so we’ve created one place to find them! We’ve added an entire Member Hub to our website, accessible for every member via the login button.
Not only will you find everything you need to make the most of your member benefits; including the ease of submitting your member news at the click of a button, or book time for us to interview you for our Meet our Member features, we are launching a Member intelligence library of case studies, research and market insights from across our network. Jo will be in touch soon with all the details you need.
One of the things you’ll find in our Member Intelligence library is every edition of our India Monthly Social Scorecard. Created in partnership with Comscore, we rank the brands and people earning the most engagement in India across Facebook, Instagram and X, counting every like, comment, share and reaction.
This month is our 1-year anniversary of the India Monthly Social Scorecard and here are some top insights to celebrate.
- Engagement is outgrowing the audience; audience up 12% (392.6m to 440.6m people), top brand engagement is up 2.3x (101m to 230m)
- Unsurprisingly, Cricket makes up around half of every top-five brand table, and the three biggest months line up with the T20 World Cup and the IPL.
- In most categories the top influencer achieves more engagement than the top brand, sometimes by 30x.
- PM Narendra Modi topped the influencer table every month, aside from in March 2026 during the T20 World Cup when it was cricketer Sanju Samson.
- The sparkle emoji appears in the top emojis every month.
Happy anniversary Roberta, Maite and Comscore team! ✨
See you on the 20th August
You loved our January Members Evening so much, you asked us to do two a year – so we are! Our second Members Evening is on the 20 August, and based on how competitive the pub quiz got last time, you may want to start brushing up on your trivia now.
We’re not done listening to your ideas either; later this year we’ll ask every member company what serves you well and what’s missing, and your answers will set our 2027 priorities.Tiffin Time returns in October, and we’ll announce our November Member Discussion topic soon.
To everyone who shared a perspective in our research, has a Board or Council seat, joined our Member Discussion, has made time with Jo and I for a 1:1 thank you for standing strong beside us.
Kind regards,
