Commerce in the Moment of Influence

There was a time when influence and commerce lived in separate rooms. A consumer saw an ad on television, remembered it for a week, and eventually bought the product in a store. Today those two rooms have merged into one. The scroll, the livestream, the creator review and the checkout button now sit inside the same thirty seconds. This is commerce in the moment of influence, and it was the central theme of our recent OM Forward session in Kuala Lumpur.

The consumer has already changed
Malaysian consumers are anxious as well as value-conscious. Rising household expenses have made every ringgit deliberate: shoppers switch brands readily when price and value tilt, hunt vouchers across platforms, and treat reviews and authentic user content as the real product page. Before committing to a purchase, 62.9% of Malaysian Gen Z now research brands first, a figure that climbs year on year. Expectations have risen in parallel: most Malaysians want personalised offers and experiences, and most feel brands fall short of delivering them. Breaking through the clutter with genuine relevance has become the price of entry.

Brands face their own version of this squeeze. The digital commerce landscape grows more complex by the day, retailers play by their own rules of engagement, and endless data is available with little clarity on how to turn it into results. Most teams still operate with a limited view of their category and competition, and closing that intelligence gap is where sustainable advantage now starts.

Social and live commerce: the battleground is wide open
Malaysia's social commerce market reached US$1.36 billion in 2025, powered by 28.4 million Malaysians on social media, roughly 80% of the population. Live commerce has grown from novelty to core channel: up to 22% of platform GMV in Malaysia now comes from livestream, live and interactive sessions convert 3–5 times faster than static ads, and Malaysian creator-led lives deliver ROAS of 3.8–5.6x before any paid amplification is applied.

The brands winning here treat live as a funnel rather than an event: tease the stream, run it with intent, then retarget the audience it created. Affiliates form the connective tissue around this, from platform-native programmes on Shopee and Lazada with the highest purchase intent, to KOL affiliates on TikTok Shop, the fastest-growing lane in the mix. Deployed with discipline across always-on, D-Day peaks and campaign-linked bursts, affiliates turn borrowed trust into measurable sales.

The next shopper might be a machine
The most profound shift is still arriving. 70% of Gen Z shoppers in APAC now begin product research with an AI tool, and AI assistants routinely compress an entire category into a shortlist of about three options. The first major scale of agentic checkout is expected by 2027. In Malaysia, Shopee is already making big leaps, with a plug-in that lets shoppers search and browse products conversationally inside ChatGPT, while add-to-cart and checkout still happen on Shopee.

If an AI agent is doing the shortlisting, the question every brand must answer is simple: will your products make the cut of three? This is why generative engine optimisation, or GEO, matters now. Structured data is the gateway to agentic commerce, trust signals are the new ranking currency, and AI-first search is rewriting visibility rules. At Omnicom, our AI Optix suite was built precisely for this: to help brands understand, measure and optimise how they appear across the AI platforms reshaping discovery and purchase.

What this means for brands in SEA

Four takeaways framed our OM Forward discussion: close the intelligence gap on category and competition with Ecommerce Intelligence App (tracking, Share of Search, Pricing and Promo, Category Sizing, Inventory, SKU Bundling Architecture); treat personalisation and clutter-breaking creative as requirements rather than nice-to-haves; move live and social commerce out of the experimental column; and be the first mover as the AI-led buying journey arrives.

Flywheel exists for exactly this moment. As Omnicom's end-to-end commerce arm, present in 32+ countries and trusted by over half of the world's 100 largest CPG brands, we connect retail media, retail operations and marketplace intelligence into one engine with a singular goal: incremental sales and share growth for our clients.

Influence used to end where commerce began. That line has disappeared. The brands that thrive next will be the ones built to convert attention the instant it forms.