Grab and GoTo super-apps: how to actually market inside Southeast Asia's everything-apps
Short version: stop thinking of Grab and GoTo as a place to buy a banner. They're retail media networks sitting on top of first-party transaction data — they know who just ordered dinner, who commutes past your store, who tops up their wallet on payday. The brands that win on the super-apps buy that intent, near the moment of purchase, and treat the everything-app as a lower-funnel machine. The ones that waste money buy car-top wraps for "awareness" and call it a Southeast Asia strategy.
Every foreign brand entering Southeast Asia eventually asks the same question: how do I reach people on Grab or Gojek? It's the right instinct. These apps are where a huge share of urban daily life runs — rides, food, groceries, payments, loans — all under one login. But the instinct usually curdles into the wrong buy. People picture a billboard on wheels and stop there. The interesting part of the super-apps isn't the surface you can see. It's the data underneath.
What the everything-app actually is (from a marketer's seat)
Grab runs across eight Southeast Asian countries and hundreds of cities, with tens of millions of monthly transacting users and its first full year of net profit reported in 2025. GoTo — Gojek plus GoPay, with Tokopedia's marketplace now folded into TikTok Shop — is the Indonesian heavyweight, and turned its first quarterly profit in late 2025. Both spent a decade subsidising rides and food to win the login. Now they're monetising it, and advertising is a big part of the plan: GrabAds alone reaches consumers across roughly 465 cities and, by Grab's own 2025 disclosures, contributes on the order of $100 million a year in revenue.
Here's the number that should reframe your thinking. Grab has said that a large majority of active users — north of 60% — transact every single time they open the app. That's not a browsing audience. That's a wallet-out, about-to-spend audience. On a social feed you interrupt someone's downtime; on a super-app you catch them mid-errand. Those are completely different marketing situations, and they call for completely different ads.
The mistake: buying the super-app like out-of-home
The default foreign-brand buy is car-top screens and app-open splash banners, priced and measured like a billboard: impressions, reach, a nice photo for the deck. It's the easiest thing to sell and the easiest thing to approve, which is exactly why it's usually the wrong first move. You're paying premium first-party-data CPMs to run a brand-awareness format you could buy cheaper almost anywhere else.
The whole reason to be inside Grab or Gojek is proximity to the transaction. If your campaign doesn't use that proximity — a sponsored listing when someone's already in GrabMart, an offer that lands when the wallet is open — you've bought the most expensive version of a generic impression. Use the app for what only the app can do.
How to actually use them: match the format to the funnel
The super-apps offer a real spread of formats. The skill is knowing which job each one does, and buying in roughly this order of priority for a brand that needs sales, not applause:
| Format | Where it lives | Best job |
|---|---|---|
| Sponsored / boosted listings | Inside GrabFood, GrabMart, GoFood search & home | Conversion — catch buyers already shopping your category |
| In-app display & native | Home feed mastheads, power banners, native video | Consideration — nudge a wallet-open user toward a first try |
| Wallet & offer integrations | GrabRewards, GoPay vouchers, cashback | Trial and repeat — subsidise the first and second purchase |
| Audience targeting for off-app media | First-party segments piped to the open web | Precision reach — find your buyers elsewhere, no cookies |
| Car-top / DOOH wraps | Driver fleet, on the road | Broad awareness — real, but the last dollar, not the first |
Notice the awareness format — the one most brands lead with — sits at the bottom. Start where the money changes hands. If you sell a snack, a sponsored slot inside GrabMart search reaches someone who is literally filling a cart. That's a conversion buy, and you can measure it against orders, not eyeballs.
The real prize is the first-party data
In a post-cookie world, clean first-party data on actual purchase behaviour is scarce and valuable. The super-apps have it in a way almost nobody in Southeast Asia can match — because they sit across mobility, food, groceries, and payments for the same person. They can build an audience of "people who order premium coffee three times a week in Jakarta" from behaviour, not guesswork. GoTo and Tokopedia have already pushed this outward, partnering to let brands target and measure against real shopping behaviour on the open internet, not just inside the app.
So the sophisticated play isn't only running ads on the app. It's using the app's audiences as the targeting layer for everything — your programmatic, your social, your retargeting — anchored to what people actually bought rather than what a third-party cookie guessed they might like. That's the capability worth paying a premium for. The banner is just the sample.
Where foreign brands still get it wrong
- One app, one country. Grab is regional, but the buyer differs sharply between Manila, Bangkok, and Ho Chi Minh City. In Indonesia, GoTo and Gojek often matter more than Grab. Don't run one creative across eight markets and call it localised.
- No offline conversion path. If your product isn't sold on GrabMart, GoFood, or a partnered store, an in-app ad has nowhere to send the intent it creates. Line up the "buy" before you buy the ad.
- Measuring reach, ignoring return. The whole point of transaction-adjacent media is that you can tie spend to sales. If your report still leads with impressions, you're grading the super-app on a curve that hides whether it worked.
- Treating it as either/or with TikTok Shop. After the Tokopedia–TikTok tie-up, discovery and checkout increasingly blur. The super-app and the social-commerce app do different jobs; run them as a pair, not a bake-off.
Bottom line
Grab and GoTo are not a Southeast Asia media channel you tick off with a banner. They're the closest thing the region has to a purchase-intent utility — a login most people transact on every time they open it. Buy them for what they uniquely offer: proximity to the sale and first-party data on who actually spends. Start at the bottom of the funnel where you can measure a return, use the audience layer to make the rest of your media smarter, and put the car-top wrap last, not first. Do that and the everything-app earns its premium. Buy it like a billboard and you'll pay data prices for a photo in a deck.
If you're planning a Southeast Asia launch and trying to figure out where the super-apps fit in the mix, that's the kind of call I help brands make — reach out. For a broader read on sequencing a regional entry, see the cross-border marketing playbook, and if Indonesia is your first market, don't miss why Singapore is a poor proxy for the rest of Southeast Asia.