Indonesia's leaders reframe ROI as tech, talent and platforms reset the rules

At DMA Indonesia 2025, the closing session - “ROI by design: How Indonesia’s leaders are balancing spend, tech and impact” - offered a rare, unfiltered look into how two major consumer-facing organisations are adapting to tighter budgets, shifting platform economics and the acceleration of AI.

Despite the noise surrounding ad tech, martech and automation, both speakers grounded their strategies in structural discipline: clear North Stars, customer-centric integration and a reset of organisational mindset.

The session featured Juliana Cen, managing director of HP Indonesia, and Isabel Falco, chief digital and marketing officer at L’Oréal Indonesia - two leaders operating at scale across categories where consumer expectations, retail channels and product cycles move quickly and often at odds with each other.

Don't miss: How HP Indonesia is building a unified brand for a fragmented market

The performance pendulum swings back

Falco opened with a reality marketers everywhere recognise: the industry’s overcorrection towards performance channels.

She noted the shift from legacy TV-led models to a world where immediate attribution created a gravitational pull toward lower-funnel optimisation. “I’ve seen this journey of marketers and brands in general to migrate more and more to performance marketing, because the immediate result there you can see.”

But she cautioned that over-dependence erodes long-term returns. “If you put too much money on performance media without making sure that the upper funnel is sufficient, you’ll start seeing less and less returns.”

Her diagnosis mirrors global econometric literature: brand investment retains compounding power. And while channel mixes will naturally differ across mass and luxury categories, her view is unequivocal - demand generation should anchor annual spending decisions.

HP’s data-led discipline: Automating the “where to play”

For HP Indonesia, Cen’s challenge differs from traditional FMCG models. With hardware, solutions and third-party partners all influencing share, the decisions around where to deploy spend can easily fragment.

Her answer is automation as alignment. The company’s internal system - HP Amplify Data Insights - consolidates partner data, inventory movement, pricing, campaign performance and HP’s product roadmap into a single prioritisation engine.

“It will give a suggestion like, for example, which customer that we should partner with, what kind of campaign we should focus first… it’s very technology-driven.”

This is as much a governance shift as it is an analytical one. Rather than individual teams producing isolated reports, HP leans on unified dashboards that guide both HP’s internal teams and its reseller ecosystem. The result is a more coherent “One HP” approach across sales, marketing, solution teams and partners.

Internally, driving that alignment is a leadership-level mandate. Cen described a deliberate move away from product-centric thinking: “We need to make sure that… they have to think about what the One HP campaign is… it’s very much a customer-centric approach rather than an internal, product-silo approach.”

The KPI stack: One North Star, many signals

Asked how she cuts through competing dashboards and fast-multiplying metrics, Falco emphasised organisational clarity.

“The main KPI is going to be, are we going ahead of the market?” she said. From this single North Star, L’Oréal builds a KPI hierarchy: brand equity and awareness as leading indicators for share, followed by operational metrics such as traffic and search interest. Her emphasis is not the number of KPIs, but the coherence between them.

“There’s a million and one KPIs available… the trick and the key is to figure out, at the end of the day, what is the North Star?” Falco added.

Both speakers acknowledged the enduring value of first-party data, but neither treated it as a silver bullet.

For HP, first-party data is only powerful once combined with partner data to produce the right analytics and action plan. For a business with upsell and cross-sell potential across PCs, printers, workstations and services, the aim is not just precision targeting but discovering new opportunity spaces inside the customer lifecycle.

L’Oréal, operating across 16 beauty brands, treats first- and second-party data as complementary. “It’s always going to be a mix of both… the more granular signals you can get, the better that you can create models for targeting and optimisation.”

Doing more with less: A creativity challenge, not a constraint

With budgets tightening across the region, both leaders reframed the perennial “more with less” expectation.

Cen sees it as an innovation trigger: “Think of it as a way to become more creative, to deliver impact with a high ROI, but with less expense or cost.” She argued that AI and automation now allow teams to streamline production cycles that once required full-scale agencies.

Falco’s advice was more behavioural: marketers must nurture curiosity and learning agility. “What you know now, will probably not be true in the future in this very volatile world.” For a beauty business deeply interlinked with platforms, Falco dismissed the idea of chasing the algorithm as a strategy. “The black box will be a black box.”

Instead, she argued, the anchor is timeless: understand the consumer more deeply than the platforms do. The method of delivery may change; the human motivations behind purchase do not. “At the end of the day… the one that you’re talking to… is still going to be the consumer,” Falco said.

This consumer-first approach helps teams survive platform volatility, from recommender model changes to content format shifts.

Across both perspectives, one theme stood out: real ROI comes not from chasing every new technology, but from setting disciplined priorities, architecting data around customer needs, and nurturing teams that can adapt as fast as the market evolves.

Indonesia’s digital foundations - skyrocketing mobile commerce, widespread AI adoption among knowledge workers, and a young, experiment-hungry market - continue fuelling rapid change. But this panel reminded marketers that the strategic centre of gravity still rests in fundamentals: brand strength, aligned KPIs, integrated data and leadership-driven mindset shifts.

For an industry often preoccupied with tools, the message was refreshingly human.

Related articles:
L’Oréal Indonesia backs refill culture to future-proof luxury beauty
L’Oréal consolidates influencer marketing under WPP in Australia and New Zealand
How Indonesia's agencies are reimagining creativity, intelligence, and growth in 2026