Wall’s Malaysia wins at the MARKies for making an RM3 ice cream something you earn

This post is sponsored by DT.

Every mid-morning and mid-afternoon, a familiar restlessness sets in. Malaysians reach for their phones, and while some open a game, others scroll social media. Somewhere in that window, they decide what to snack on, and the decision takes seconds.

Wall’s calls this “snackxiety”, and research the brand commissioned puts the share of Malaysians who feel it daily at up to 65%. Its answer was Wall’s TopTen Xtra, the country’s first six-layer ice cream priced at RM3 and positioned as something to be earned rather than a discount treat. The campaign that made that positioning stick ran on contextual in-app advertising with DT. It won a MARKies Awards in 2026 for Most Effective Use - Mobile.

Behind the campaign sits a wider shift in how DT sells into markets like Malaysia. Sea Yen Ong, vice president of sales for APAC at DT, unpacks what that shift looks like in practice, why the platform's structure matters more than its metrics, and where the region's ad budgets are heading.

1. How has your strategy evolved over the past few years to meet the needs of the modern client?

Modern advertisers know consumers don’t spend as much time on the open web anymore. They live inside apps. Through the acquisitions we've made, we've moved the business toward curating high-attention in-app brand experiences.

That shift shows up in what we can now offer through DT Ads in-app supply: direct SDK-level access to the environments where consumers spend up to five hours a day, across mobile gaming, micro-dramas, live sports, and daily utility apps. We also moved past viewability to active attention, pairing user-opted rewarded video formats with third-party attention measurement from Lumen and Adelaide to show that in-app time spent drives brand lift.

2. Brands are getting more cautious about how dependent they are on a handful of walled-garden platforms for reach. What’s driving that caution, and what should brands be doing about it?

Brands are reconsidering how much they invest in walled gardens as ad fatigue reaches an all-time high. GWI data shows that less than 40% of the mobile audience's time is spent on those platforms.

The move is into lean-forward in-app environments. Someone playing a casual mobile game, watching a micro-drama, checking live scores, or working through a utility app is on one screen with nothing else competing for it. A brand placed in that full-screen environment earns undistracted attention, which delivers higher recall and a lower cost per second of attention than a scroll through a social feed.

3. Most platforms in this space buy media on someone else's supply. DT sits on both the demand and the distribution side. Why does that structural difference matter for a brand's outcome, not just for your business model?

Most ad networks resell. They buy inventory through layers of intermediaries, which adds an ad-tech tax and widens the surface for fraud.

DT is built differently. Our SDK is integrated directly into more than 80,000 mobile apps, and that direct relationship changes three things for a brand:

• No supply-chain markup. More of the budget goes to working media rather than intermediary fees.
• Verified brand safety and viewability. Direct SDK integration supports the IAB Open Measurement SDK and closes off domain spoofing.
• Creative that renders as built. High-definition video and custom rich media formats play natively, without buffering or dropped frames.

4. Short drama content has become one of the fastest-growing attention categories in the region. How is that reshaping the inventory you can offer brands?

Micro-drama apps are one of the fastest-growing categories in mobile video, with adoption up more than 100% year over year. We integrated these publishers directly into the network, which reshaped our supply portfolio in two ways:

• Native vertical video placements. Full-screen 9:16 video inserted at episode transitions, matching the cinematic feel of the content around it.
• Rewarded episode unlocks. Viewers choose to watch a 15- to 30-second brand video to unlock the next episode. Completion rates run above 90%, and the value exchange builds affinity rather than spending it.

5. As more content such as short drama and gaming moves natively in-app, what kind of ad experience works there compared with formats built for the open web?

Open web formats fail inside apps. Banners and auto-play pop-ups interrupt gesture navigation, and users perceive them as obstacles.

In-app formats have to work with the experience rather than against it:

• Rewarded video. A viewer trades 15 to 30 seconds of attention for game items, an extra level, or a drama episode. It is voluntary, and it drives high recall.
• Interactive rich media and playables. Swipeable, touchable end cards that let users engage with the product directly within the ad.
• Pause and break ads. Full-screen video served at a natural break, such as level completion in a puzzle game or the gap before the next drama episode.

For brands still weighing whether to move budget out of walled gardens, Wall's TopTen Xtra is a data point worth sitting with.

An RM3 product captured measurable share from premium-priced competitors by appearing at the moment consumers were already primed to reward themselves. That came from a sharper read of context rather than a bigger budget.

Southeast Asia's in-app attention is not going to stay underused. The brands building in these environments now are the ones setting the terms for the next few years of attention in this region.