Cover Shermaine Wong, founder and CEO of Cult Creative, shares her insights on how brands and consumers can navigate a digital world overwhelmed by content
Shermaine Wong, founder and CEO of Cult Creative, shares her insights on how brands and consumers can navigate a digital world overwhelmed by content
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When campaigns are met with silence, it is not apathy but assessment. Drawing on insights from over 500 brand campaigns, Cult Creative’s founder and CEO Shermaine Wong shares why Malaysian audiences have become radically discerning, and why relevance today is earned through credibility, care and cultural fluency rather than noise
The campaign launched on a Monday. By Friday, the client called—not because there were complaints, but because there was nothing. No comments. No shares. Not even courtesy engagement. Just silence.
"Should we be worried?"
Yes. But not for the reason they thought.
Across 500 brand campaigns in 2025, I’ve watched a quiet shift in how Malaysians engage with public-facing culture. It isn’t that we’re tired of content. We’re exhausted by irrelevance—and we’ve become remarkably efficient at filtering it out.
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The industry calls this “content fatigue.” I call it instant discernment.
Consider your own behaviour. Within one or two seconds, often without realising it, you decide whether something deserves space in your mental world. Your brain pattern-matches at speed: generic brand message? Scroll. Corporate platitude? Scroll. You don’t argue with it. You don’t reject it. It simply disappears. This filtering happens so quickly—neurological, not attitudinal—that the brain now treats generic brand content the way it treats ambient noise: background static that never reaches conscious awareness.
This isn’t exhaustion. It’s evolution.
Above Wong says, “Trust is no longer automatically granted to brands, media or platforms. It is earned through proximity—through community, shared values and perceived authenticity”
Wong says, “Trust is no longer automatically granted to brands, media or platforms. It is earned through proximity—through community, shared values and perceived authenticity”
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We now live in a media environment that collapses geography and culture. In a single evening, a Malaysian viewer can move from a K-drama to a YouTube cooking series to a Netflix binge—and still have time to scroll through a dozen creator feeds. That exposure creates unusually high standards. When your cultural diet is global, mediocrity doesn’t blend in. It stands out.
In Malaysia, where there is a deep social sensitivity to insincerity and hard selling, inauthenticity doesn't merely fail. It quietly repels.
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Add the realities of modern life—rising costs, side hustles, demanding careers—and attention becomes a genuinely scarce resource. If something doesn’t feel human, useful, or culturally fluent almost immediately, it is discarded. Not with anger. With efficiency.
This is why silence has become the new backlash.
In the past, bad work was called out publicly. Today, it simply vanishes. Brands often mistake this quiet for success. “No complaints” feels like a win. In reality, it’s a warning signal. You didn’t earn enough relevance to provoke a response.
A friend’s saved post matters more than a celebrity’s sponsored one. A private recommendation from someone trusted carries more commercial weight than any billboard
The irony is that this moment of heightened discernment is happening just as cultural output has reached industrial scale. Over 1.3 billion TikTok videos are now AI-generated. When efficiency outpaces judgment at that scale, the result isn’t just sameness—it’s a collapse in cultural signal.
What is emerging instead is a quieter form of influence—one that is less visible, but far more powerful.
A creator with 1,500 followers generated over 800,000 views for our client, Peaches & Cream, this year. Another with 7,200 followers delivered 336,000 views for Spritzer. Most of those views came from people who didn’t even follow them. Their power wasn’t in scale. It was credibility. Their recommendations didn’t feel like advertising. It felt like receiving genuine advice.
Influence, in this sense, has become relational rather than institutional. A friend’s saved post matters more than a celebrity’s sponsored one. A private recommendation from someone trusted carries more commercial weight than any billboard.
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This mirrors a broader cultural shift. Trust is no longer automatically granted to brands, media, or platforms. It is earned through proximity—through community, shared values and perceived authenticity. The most meaningful brand impact now happens in private spaces: in saved posts, forwarded messages, and quiet conversations that never appear on public feeds.
This is where many legacy brands have struggled with automation. Efficiency has outpaced judgment. Craft has been replaced by convenience. Audiences may not always be able to articulate what feels “off,” but they do sense when something has been produced rather than considered.
“Good enough,” in this environment, has become the “new terrible.”
Above “Audiences may not always be able to articulate what feels ‘off,’ but they do sense when something has been produced rather than considered,” Wong shares
“Audiences may not always be able to articulate what feels ‘off,’ but they do sense when something has been produced rather than considered,” Wong shares
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For readers who appreciate discernment in fashion, cuisine, design or travel, this dynamic should feel familiar. You wouldn’t tolerate a poorly tailored suit just because it arrived quickly. You wouldn’t praise a forgettable meal because it was prepared in minutes. Cultural value has always been about care, not speed.
The same standard now applies to brands in the public sphere.
Malaysia’s most discerning consumers—the very people reading this—have become the region’s most influential tastemakers. Not through public visibility, but through private networks and peer-to-peer recommendation loops that cannot be engineered through media spend alone.
The brands that are thriving in 2026 share a distinct mindset. They choose intentionality over volume. Conviction over neutrality. Cultural fluency over broad appeal. They collaborate with creators as partners rather than placements. They build communities rather than campaigns.
They also measure success differently. Not by how many people saw something, but by how many chose to keep it: to save it, share it, or return to it. These are signals of genuine value, not fleeting attention.
What’s missing for most organisations isn’t technology, data or access. It’s courage.
The courage to stand for something specific. To make less, but make it matter. To trust that the public is more perceptive than we often give them credit for.
The courage to stand for something specific. To make less, but make it matter. To trust that the public is more perceptive than we often give them credit for
The market isn’t tired.
It’s discerning.
And in a culture that increasingly values privacy over performance, the brands that will matter are not the ones demanding attention—but the ones earning invitation into private spaces, personal conversations and cultural memory.
The question is no longer whether people will see your brand. It’s whether you have the courage to be worth keeping.
Shermaine Wong is founder and CEO of Cult Creative, Southeast Asia's leading creator marketing platform connecting brands and creators through data-driven storytelling. A branding strategist who has worked with Cartier, H&M and Disney, she founded Cult Creative during the pandemic and scaled it into a profitable regional company serving clients across Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. In 2025, Cult Creative executed over 500 brand campaigns with more than 8,500 creators. Wong was recently recognised as Most Innovative Agency Leader of the Year (NEXT Martech Awards 2025).
Credits
Images: Cult Creative
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