Grab Taps VaynerMedia to Craft 16K Different Ads Across Asia
The agency's new platform quickly built a trove of localized ads for Grab across Southeast Asia.
VaynerMedia Asia Pacific has deployed CREAITORS, an AI-powered creative platform that generated more than 16,000 culturally tailored ad variations for Southeast Asian super app Grab across six markets in 2025.
The system delivered these variations within traditional campaign budgets and timelines, marking what the agency calls a shift from one-off productions to continuously adaptive creative operations.
The platform's first live deployment, called Group Order Content Kitchen, aimed to increase awareness and usage of Grab's Group Order feature across Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
CREAITORS integrates three core components: first-party customer data, platform performance signals, and generative AI. Rather than producing a single campaign adapted for different markets, the system creates thousands of distinct ad versions tailored to specific audience segments within each country.
Leighton Cosseboom
"AI is unlocking infinite creative possibilities, allowing us to do things we were never able to do before," said Tim Lindley, Managing Director at VaynerMedia APAC. "This isn't about making one brilliant ad, it's about thousands of brilliant ads, each tailored to a cohort, enabling us to be more relevant to more people than ever before."
The platform's 16,000-plus permutations reflect Southeast Asia's linguistic and cultural diversity, enabling the brand to tailor campaigns for Muslim-majority Malaysia, Buddhist Thailand, and cosmopolitan Singapore within a single operational framework. Stakeholders claim early results showed measurable shifts in awareness and adoption of the Group Order feature, though specific percentage gains were not disclosed.
VaynerMedia positions CREAITORS as a functional business asset rather than experimental tech. The system operates as an always-on platform that adjusts creative output based on performance data and market signals, contrasting with traditional campaign cycles that produce fixed creative assets.
"AI is a calculator for creativity. It doesn't replace humans but accelerates ideation," said Denny Handlin, Executive Creative Officer at VaynerMedia. The agency emphasizes that human oversight remains essential to ensure impact and cultural appropriateness across diverse markets.
Leighton Cosseboom
The six-market rollout addresses Southeast Asia's fragmented consumer base, where localized storytelling is critical for engagement in markets ranging from Vietnam's 98 million population to Indonesia's 278 million.
The platform's purported ability to generate culturally relevant variations at scale within existing budget constraints represents a practical application of AI in regional marketing operations.
VaynerMedia's APAC team includes Creative Lead Woei Hern, who works with clients including Visa and PepsiCo and has presented at Cannes Lions on AI's role in creative processes.
The agency launched its consulting products in Asia Pacific in 2024 to bring social media strategies to the center of marketing operations.
Competitors, including Ogilvy and Havas, are similarly investing in AI-powered creative tools, though VaynerMedia's partnership with Grab establishes a benchmark for scalability across multiple Southeast Asian markets simultaneously. The deployment demonstrates how agencies are moving AI applications from pilot projects to core operational systems that previously handled production volumes, requiring significantly larger budgets or extended timelines.
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