About 55% of Southeast Asian consumers say ads influence their next purchase, and the figure is even higher in Thailand (66%) and Indonesia (60%). Online buyers in the region are also 1.6 times more likely than the global average to draw inspiration from ads.
This creates a strong opportunity for brands, but reaching the right audiences is becoming more competitive. With consumers spread across different channels and content environments, businesses need a media mix that helps them connect with people throughout the buying journey.
For brands looking to expand their regional reach, Telegram offers another way to connect with relevant audiences in Southeast Asia. Strong usage in several major SEA markets, interest-led communities, and native advertising options make it a useful addition to the media mix.
In this article, we’ll explore why Telegram deserves a place in the SEA media mix and how its advertising tools can help brands expand their regional reach.
Southeast Asia remains one of the most attractive regions for digital growth, but reaching new customers efficiently is becoming more complex. Several SEA advertising trends are changing how brands reach and engage audiences:
Competition for digital inventory continues to increase. Digital ad impressions across Southeast Asia expanded throughout 2025 and are projected to reach around 3.6 trillion in 2026, while tracked digital ad spend is expected to exceed $3 billion. Indonesia alone generated 280 billion ad impressions and $156 million in spend in Q1 2026. For teams managing customer acquisition in Southeast Asia, that means competing for attention in an increasingly active advertising market.
Repeated exposure is creating measurable ad fatigue. Ad fatigue is highest in Indonesia at 69%, followed by the Philippines at 67%, Thailand at 65%, and Singapore at 63%. For Gen Z, repetitive ads are even more frustrating. They’re 57% more likely to feel annoyed when the same brand appears repeatedly on one channel and expect a more seamless, personalized experience.
Consumer attention is spread across more environments. Southeast Asian consumers spend more than eight hours per day across an average of five media environments, including streaming, gaming, news, websites, and other digital channels. This fragmentation is changing digital marketing in Southeast Asia, making it harder for one or two platforms to cover the full customer journey.
For performance teams, the implication is clear: growth increasingly depends on expanding the acquisition mix. Telegram can add new audience access, different targeting contexts, and another source of scalable reach across SEA markets.
While Telegram popularity in Southeast Asia varies by market, the platform already reaches a substantial share of connected consumers in several key countries. 60.7% of internet users aged 16+ in Malaysia used Telegram at least once in the past month, alongside 58.4% in Indonesia, 55.7% in the Philippines, and 45.9% in Singapore. All four markets sit above the 33.8% global benchmark.
| Country | % of internet users 16+ who used Telegram in the past month |
| Malaysia | 60.7% |
| Indonesia | 58.4% |
| Philippines | 55.7% |
| Singapore | 45.9% |
| Vietnam | 32.4% |
| Thailand | 20.0% |
For advertisers looking to reach Telegram users in Southeast Asia, that creates another effective channel alongside social, search, and display media.
Many major advertising platforms infer interest from a wide mix of browsing, engagement, demographic, and behavioral signals. Telegram audience targeting adds another layer of context through the channels and bots users actively choose to engage with. In fact, nearly 50% of Telegram users regularly check 6–15 channels, while almost 40% enable push notifications for up to five channels.
This makes audience selection more closely connected to what users are already interested in, which is especially useful for products aimed at narrower or specialist segments. A FinTech company can work around trading, investing, payments, or crypto interests. An education provider can focus on audiences following professional development, technology, language learning, or finance. Real estate advertisers can build campaigns around investment, relocation, property, and wealth-related content. That added context help brands focus on audiences with a closer fit to the product or offer.
Another advantage of Telegram for business in Southeast Asia is the flexibility advertisers have after the click. An ad can lead into a channel, specific post, bot, mini app, website, app store, or another supported destination depending on the campaign setup.
A mobile app may send users directly to an app store. A real estate company can move prospects into a bot that collects budget, location, and property preferences. A Web3 company may direct users into its product or community inside Telegram. An education provider can use a bot to recommend programs and qualify prospects before a sales conversation.
This gives brands more control over Telegram customer acquisition, because the destination can be matched to the campaign objective and the next action they want users to take.
A broader Telegram marketing strategy can continue working after the first acquisition touchpoint. Someone acquired through a paid campaign can subscribe to a channel, return to a bot, use a mini app, or stay connected through community content.
That creates more opportunities to communicate with the same audience without paying for a new impression every time. Brands can use their Telegram presence for product updates, educational content, launches, offers, support, and other ongoing interactions.
It is especially useful when the path to conversion takes more than one touchpoint. Instead of treating each campaign interaction as isolated, businesses can build a longer relationship with interested users and create more chances to move them toward action over time.
Telegram Ads gives businesses a native way to reach users across channels, bots, and search. The format is mainly text-based, but advertisers can add emojis, banners, GIFs, and short videos to make ads more engaging and better suited to different campaign objectives.
Telegram Ads
Let’s have a closer look at the targeting capabilities of Telegram Ads and how they can be used to build more focused campaigns.
Telegram Ads targeting can focus on specific channels, bots, and search terms, or work more broadly with topics and audiences of selected channels. This lets brands build campaigns around both the content users are consuming and the communities they are already connected to.
A FinTech advertiser, for example, can focus on finance and investing topics, place ads in selected trading or crypto channels, and reach audiences connected to relevant financial communities. A gaming brand can build campaigns around gaming channels and bots, while education, e-commerce, travel, and real estate advertisers can apply the same logic to the topics and channel audiences closest to their products.
Brands using Telegram Ads in Southeast Asia can separate campaigns by geography and language, making it easier to adapt messaging, budgets, offers, and landing pages for each country.
A regional advertiser could therefore run Bahasa Indonesia campaigns for Indonesia, Vietnamese campaigns for Vietnam, and separate English or local-language campaigns where audience composition requires it. Telegram can restrict delivery by country and more specific locations while also using content language as a relevance signal.
Advertisers can also separate campaigns by device type. This is especially useful for mobile apps, where iOS and Android users may have different acquisition costs, conversion rates, onboarding flows, or app store destinations.
Device-level segmentation also makes testing cleaner. Advertisers can compare performance by operating system, adjust bids and budgets accordingly, and send each audience to the most relevant destination or product experience. For products with different mobile journeys, this helps reduce friction between the ad click and the next step.
Magnetto’s Business Telegram Ads infrastructure supports both Telegram-native and external destinations, offering more flexibility than standard Fragment accounts. These include:
Taken together, these options give advertisers more control over Telegram advertising in Southeast Asia. Brands can adapt targeting, language, device strategy, and conversion paths by market, compare performance across countries, and scale the combinations that deliver the strongest acquisition results.
Telegram has already built a sizable and highly engaged audience across several Southeast Asian markets. Magnetto.com helps brands turn that reach into a structured acquisition channel. With euro-billed Business Telegram Ads accounts, local market expertise, and proprietary AdTech, you can reach relevant audiences more precisely, manage budgets efficiently, and scale across SEA with greater control.
Contact Magnetto to build a Telegram Ads strategy around your priority SEA markets and growth goals.
Sofia Mozolkova is the Head of Marketing at Magnetto.com. With over 7 years of experience in digital marketing, she shares her expertise to help brands effectively leverage advertising channels, build scalable growth strategies, and turn traffic into long-term customers.
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