Casting Models for Southeast Asian Markets: A Guide for Brands

By Mikle Iva, founder of Ambressa · Updated 5 August 2026

In short Western casting lists sort models by job type, such as commercial, fashion, parts or fit. In Southeast Asia the decisive question is different: which face reads as local to a specific audience. Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam have sharply different populations, and Malaysia and Singapore hold close to inverted ethnic majorities.

Fewer than one in ten of the most-downloaded visuals for Southeast Asia, Japan, Australasia, Hong Kong and Taiwan accurately represent Asian people and their lived experiences. That is not an activist claim, it is Getty Images' own finding about its own library, published through its VisualGPS research programme. The imagery brands actually buy skews youthful, slender, lighter-skinned and set at work, and it repeats across markets that have almost nothing demographically in common.

For a brand, that gap is not primarily an ethics problem. It is a targeting problem, and it costs money.

What does "model type" mean in Southeast Asia?

Search for model types and you will find Western taxonomies: fashion, commercial, catalogue, runway, editorial, fit, parts, petite, promotional. Backstage lists sixteen of them. These are useful, and they describe the job, not the person.

That vocabulary transfers to Asia unchanged. A parts model in Bangkok does the same work as a parts model in Berlin, and Ambressa books both descriptions from the same roster.

The question that does not transfer is the one that decides most commercial castings here: which face reads as local to this audience? Southeast Asia contains six markets that Western planning decks routinely treat as one, and their populations are not remotely alike. Getting this wrong rarely produces an offensive campaign. What it risks is a forgettable one, where the audience does not read the ad as being addressed to them. We cannot put a number on that effect and neither can anyone else, which is why the sensible move is to decide casting deliberately rather than by default.

What are the standard model job types?

Most brands booking in Southeast Asia need the first row. Most brands booking here need commercial models rather than fashion ones, and the requirements differ sharply. If you are ready to specify a booking now, the casting brief guide covers how to write the look section, and Ambressa's Malaysia roster is organised along the lines below.

How different are the six Southeast Asian markets?

This is the part that decides casting, and it is worth reading with the actual numbers in front of you rather than an impression of the region.

Two things jump out of that table.

First, Malaysia and Singapore are close neighbours with inverted majorities. In Malaysia the Malay community is the largest by a wide margin and the Chinese community is roughly a fifth. In Singapore that relationship flips almost exactly. A cast assembled for Kuala Lumpur and reused in Singapore is not a small adjustment away from correct; it is proportioned for a different country.

Second, Indonesia and the Philippines are not majority-anything in the way the others are. In the Philippines the largest single ethnicity, Tagalog, covers about a quarter of the household population, and the Philippine Statistics Authority records regional concentrations that swamp the national picture: Ilonggo is the top ethnicity for 67.6% of Western Visayas, Cebuano for 61.4% of Central Visayas, Bicol for 78.8% of the Bicol Region. Indonesia is similar in shape, spread across an archipelago where regional identity is strong and immediately legible to locals.

Casting "a Filipino" or "an Indonesian" is therefore not a specification. Casting for Manila, for the Visayas, or for a national campaign that has to read across regions are three different jobs.

Which typages get booked most often?

Across the region, commercial briefs tend to land on a small set of descriptions. These are audience segments, not aesthetic rankings, and the industry uses them because they map onto who the campaign is speaking to.

• Malay: the largest audience in Malaysia and a significant one in Singapore and Brunei. Frequently the default for mass-market and government-adjacent campaigns in Malaysia
• Chinese: the majority audience in Singapore, roughly a fifth of Malaysia, commercially significant across Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines
• Indian: Malaysia and Singapore, with distinct festival seasons that drive its own campaign calendar
• Pan-Asian / mixed: deliberately ambiguous, intended to read acceptably across several markets at once
• Javanese, Sundanese and other Indonesian groups: where a campaign needs regional specificity within Indonesia
• Expat / Western: for brands whose product or positioning genuinely involves a non-local audience or an international frame

A serious roster carries all of these, because a regional brand will need most of them within a single year. That is how ours is built at Ambressa.

How do you choose a typage?

Not by starting from population figures. The demographics above tell you who lives in a market; they do not tell you who buys your product or what will persuade them. Casting is the last decision in a chain, not the first:

1. Who is the campaign actually addressed to? Not the market, the buyer. A premium skincare launch in Malaysia is not addressed to the whole population.
2. Where will it run? One market, several, or the whole region. This is a media question and it sets the constraint.
3. What language and cultural context does it live in? Dialogue, festival timing, wardrobe, setting.
4. How is the product positioned? Local and familiar, international and aspirational, or somewhere between. This drives more casting decisions than demographics do.
5. Only then, casting. The typage falls out of the four answers above, and it is usually obvious once they are written down.

Where the demographics genuinely matter is step two, because they tell you how far a single cast can travel. The decision itself belongs to steps one and four.

When a campaign runs in one market

Cast to that market's composition, weighted toward the segment actually buying the product. Straightforward, and the version most brands get right.

The trap sits one level down. Malaysia's own composition varies sharply by state: Penang has a Chinese plurality while the east coast states are overwhelmingly Malay. A national campaign and a Klang Valley retail campaign are not the same brief.

When a campaign runs across the region

Two honest options, and brands should pick deliberately rather than drift.

Localise. Shoot several casts, or shoot one production with multiple talent, and run each market its own version. More expensive up front, and it performs better because each audience sees itself.

Go Pan-Asian. One cast, deliberately ambiguous, running everywhere. Cheaper and faster, and the trade-off is real: an image that offends nobody frequently also belongs to nobody. It works best where the product carries the message and the face is context rather than subject.

What does not work is choosing Pan-Asian by accident, which is what happens when a brief says "Asian" and nobody asks the next question.

When the audience is a segment, not a market

Chinese-speaking consumers in Malaysia, the Indian community in Singapore, expatriates in Jakarta or Bangkok. Here typage and language usually move together, and the casting is only half the job. If the segment is defined by what people follow rather than by where they live, the question stops being a casting one: that is influencer marketing, and it is a different product. Whether you want a single campaign or a longer relationship is its own decision.

What do brands get wrong most often?

Casting the region as one country. The single most common error, and the demographic table above is the whole argument against it.

Defaulting to lighter skin and Eurocentric features. Getty's research names this directly as a persistent gap in APAC imagery, alongside a preference for particular body types. Getty measured which images get downloaded and what consumers say about representation; it did not measure campaign sales, and nobody should claim it did. What it does give you is the audience describing how it reads advertising: four out of five consumers across APAC said that simply increasing representation is not enough, and three in five reported feeling discriminated against on grounds including race, ethnicity and body size.

Treating "authentic" as a look. Authenticity is not achieved by casting one person who resembles the demographic average and styling everything else the same way. Getty found popular imagery converges on similar messaging, styling and emotion, usually relentlessly cheerful and disconnected from any specific culture. A well-cast face in a generically staged scene still reads as stock.

How do you write typage into a brief?

Six lines, and a booker can work from them:

• Market, named as a country or a city rather than "Asia"
• Segment, if the campaign speaks to one
• Age range rather than a single number
• Register: approachable, aspirational, editorial, corporate
• Language on set, if there is dialogue or an event
• References, three or four images with a line on what you like in each

Say which items are hard requirements and which are preferences. Marking preferences as requirements is how a shortlist comes back with two names instead of twelve.

Frequently asked questions

What does "Pan-Asian" mean in a casting brief? A deliberately ambiguous look intended to read acceptably across several Asian markets at once, rather than as clearly belonging to any one of them. It is used for regional campaigns where a single cast has to run in six countries. It saves money and it dilutes local recognition, which is a fair trade in some campaigns and a poor one in others.

Is it acceptable to specify ethnicity in a casting brief? Describing the intended audience is normal in commercial casting briefs, because campaigns are addressed to defined audiences. Practice and acceptable wording vary by market and by client, and some advertisers deliberately avoid ethnic descriptors in favour of describing the audience directly. What matters is that the specification follows the campaign's actual target rather than an assumption, and that the description is written as a market segment rather than as an aesthetic ranking.

Can one cast work across all six Southeast Asian markets? Sometimes, when the product carries the message and the face is context rather than subject. Where the person is the message, the demographic differences between these markets are too large for one cast to serve them all well. Malaysia and Singapore alone have close to inverted majorities.

How many typages should a regional campaign shoot? There is no reliable rule, and anyone offering one is guessing. In practice regional campaigns tend to settle on fewer casts than markets, covering the largest audiences and serving the rest with whichever is closest. Whether six separate casts pay for themselves depends on the size of each market to your brand, not on a general principle.

Does typage matter for e-commerce as much as for campaigns? Less. High-volume e-commerce is about the garment, and consistency across a catalogue often matters more than local recognition. The moment a face carries the message, typage returns as a first-order decision.

Where do expat and Western models fit? Where the brand's positioning genuinely involves an international frame, or where the campaign speaks to an expatriate audience directly. Used as an unexamined default for local mass-market campaigns, they are the specific pattern Getty's research flags. Whether that costs a given campaign anything is a question only that campaign's own testing can answer.

About the author

Mikle Iva is the founder of Ambressa, an influencer and brand ambassador agency working across Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. He handles the agency's casting briefs and creator selection.

About Ambressa

Ambressa is an influencer and brand ambassador agency working across six Southeast Asian markets: Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. We hold a deep roster spanning the typages above, and we ask which market and which audience before suggesting anybody, because the answer changes the entire shortlist.

Tell us who your campaign is speaking to: ambressa.com/model-agency-malaysia