Advertisers in Malaysia spent RM604.4 million on tracked media in March 2026, more than 20% above February, as the festive run of Chinese New Year, Ramadan and Hari Raya Aidilfitri pulled budgets into the first quarter, according to Nielsen Ad Intel data published in Kuala Lumpur on November 3, 2026. Social media advertising rose 40% in a month to RM186 million and digital advertising climbed 55.9% to RM52.1 million, yet free-to-air television remained the largest single channel with RM271.0 million, or 44.8% of the month's tracked spend.

In Short

Nielsen added up how much brands spent on advertising in Malaysia around Chinese New Year, Ramadan and Hari Raya in 2026, and found that spending reached RM604.4 million in March. Television still took the biggest share of that money, but spending on social media and other digital ads grew much faster from one month to the next. Shops and food brands spent most early in the season while technology companies spent most in April, so there was no single festive peak that applied to everyone.

What Nielsen published

The analysis carries the title "Malaysia's festive advertising trends reveal opportunities for smarter media planning, latest Nielsen data shows." It draws on two Nielsen products. Ad Intel is the company's advertising expenditure tracking service, which records what brands spend, in which categories and on which channels. Consumer & Media Insights, or CMI, is a consumer survey product that estimates how many people each media touchpoint reaches.

The spending figures run from January to September 2026, though most of the monthly detail sits in February, March, April and May - the months either side of the three festivals. Chinese New Year fell on February 17. Ramadan began within days of it, and Hari Raya Aidilfitri, which closes the fasting month, came in late March. Hari Raya Haji followed in late May. Three of the country's largest celebrations, in other words, landed within roughly five weeks of each other in 2026.

According to Nielsen, the March total of RM604.4 million represented "an increase of more than 20% compared with February, as advertisers capitalised on the festive period surrounding Chinese New Year, Ramadan and Hari Raya Aidilfitri." The release does not give February's total. By PPC Land's arithmetic, an increase of more than 20% puts February below roughly RM503.7 million. The four channels Nielsen itemises for February - free-to-air TV, social media, digital and radio - account for RM444.0 million of that on their own.

Retail and food moved first

Retail and food advertisers built their budgets earliest. According to Nielsen, retail advertising expenditure increased 15.6% between January and February, reaching RM70.5 million, and stayed elevated at RM69.1 million in March. Working backwards from the growth rate, January's retail figure was about RM61.0 million, a PPC Land calculation.

Foodstuff advertising followed a similar curve. It rose almost 19%, from RM25.4 million in January to RM30.2 million in February, before edging up again to RM31.8 million in March. Combined, the two categories accounted for RM100.9 million in March, about 16.7% of the month's tracked spend by PPC Land's calculation.

Then the festive campaigns ended. "Following Hari Raya Aidilfitri, retail expenditure declined 53.5% in April, while foodstuff advertising fell 30%," according to Nielsen. Applied to the March figures, those percentages put April retail spend at about RM32.1 million and foodstuff at about RM22.3 million. Both are PPC Land estimates built on rounded percentages, so they carry a small margin.

A second wave in May

Hari Raya Haji brought a smaller rebound. According to Nielsen, foodstuff advertising increased 41.4% in May compared with April, while retail investment rose 32.9%. On PPC Land's arithmetic, that lifts foodstuff back to roughly RM31.5 million - almost its March level - and retail to roughly RM42.7 million, which remains well below the RM69 million to RM70 million range of February and March. Food advertisers, in other words, treated the second festival almost as seriously as the first. Retailers did not.

Technology and media peaked a month later

Not every category followed the festive curve. Information Technology advertising rose from RM6.3 million in February to RM39.9 million in March, and reached RM51.6 million in April. That is a more than sixfold increase in a single month and, by April, about 8.2 times the February level.

The Media category moved in the same direction. According to Nielsen, it rose from RM9.1 million in February to RM28.5 million in March, then peaked at RM34.7 million in April.

Set side by side, the April numbers produce an inversion. Information Technology, at RM51.6 million, outspent retail, at an estimated RM32.1 million, in the month after Hari Raya; the Media category's RM34.7 million also exceeded it. Nielsen does not name the advertisers behind either category, does not define what the Media category contains, and does not explain what drove the jump in technology spending.

Nielsen's APAC Commercial Leader, Matty Lin, framed the divergence as the main finding. "These variations highlight the importance of understanding category-specific advertising patterns rather than relying on a single festive campaign window. Malaysia's festive calendar presents significant opportunities for advertisers, but our data shows that different categories compete for consumer attention at different stages of the celebrations," Lin said.

"For brands and agencies, understanding when competitors are increasing their investment, which channels they are prioritising and how consumer needs change throughout these periods is critical," Lin added. "The opportunity isn't simply to spend more during festive seasons. It's to make smarter decisions about when to advertise, where to invest and how to develop communications that are relevant to the audiences brands want to reach."

Television holds the share, social takes the growth

The channel split shows two things at once. Free-to-air TV remained the largest channel in March with RM271.0 million, or 44.8% of tracked expenditure, according to Nielsen. Social media and digital, though, posted the fastest month-on-month growth.

Between February and March, according to the release:

  • Social media advertising increased 40%, from RM132.9 million to RM186 million.
  • Digital advertising increased 55.9%, from RM33.4 million to RM52.1 million.
  • Free-to-air TV advertising grew from RM243.8 million to RM271 million. The release prints the rate as "11.%", a truncated figure; the underlying numbers work out to 11.2%.
  • Radio rose 8.4%, from RM33.9 million to RM36.7 million.

Measured in ringgit rather than percentages, the picture sharpens. Social media added RM53.1 million between February and March, almost twice the RM27.2 million added by free-to-air TV. Digital added RM18.7 million and radio RM2.8 million. Of the combined RM101.8 million increase across the four itemised channels, social media alone accounted for about 52%. These are PPC Land calculations from Nielsen's figures.

Social media's share of March spend comes to about 30.8%, digital's to about 8.6% and radio's to about 6.1%, again by PPC Land's arithmetic. That leaves RM58.6 million, or about 9.7%, spread across channels the release does not itemise for the month.

The nine-month view is more conservative. Across January to September 2026, free-to-air TV accounted for approximately 47.7% of tracked advertising expenditure, followed by social media at 29.1%, according to Nielsen. Television's March share of 44.8% was therefore about three points below its nine-month average, while social media's March share of about 30.8% ran about 1.7 points above it. The festive surge tilted toward social platforms without unseating broadcast.

That balance differs sharply from the global trend. WARC's Q3 2026 forecast puts global social media ad spend at $394.6 billion for 2026, up 21.3%, against $176.2 billion for television, up 1.2%. Worldwide, in WARC's projection, social outspends TV by more than two to one. In Nielsen's tracked Malaysian data, the ratio runs the other way. The two sets of figures are built differently - one is a forecast of market revenue, the other a tracking of observed advertising - so they are not directly comparable, but the gap in direction is wide. Nielsen's numbers place Malaysia among the markets where linear TV still commands the largest single slice of tracked spend.

Buletin Utama's festive audiences

Nielsen backed the television argument with ratings data. According to its audience measurement, TV3's Buletin Utama, the prime-time news bulletin on the free-to-air channel operated by Media Prima, recorded approximately 3.37 million viewers on March 19, 2026, during Ramadan. The same programme drew approximately 2.83 million viewers on Chinese New Year, February 17. By PPC Land's calculation, the Ramadan figure was about 19% higher.

The release does not specify whether these are average-minute audiences or reach figures, which age group they cover, or whether viewing on TV3's streaming outlets is included. Nor does it compare them with Buletin Utama's audience on an ordinary weekday, which would show how much of the figure the festivals actually added.

Reach and spend tell different stories

The second half of the analysis turns from spending to audiences, using CMI. According to Nielsen, the internet has the highest reach at 96% of the measured audience, or approximately 19.1 million people. In-store touchpoints follow at 95.5%, and out-of-home (OOH) and digital out-of-home (DOOH) at 90.7%.

Further down, according to Nielsen:

  • Radio and digital radio together reach 80.9% of the measured audience.
  • Free-to-air television reaches 72%, approximately 14.3 million people.
  • Magazines and their digital editions reach 45.6%.
  • Newspapers and their digital editions reach 45.2%.
  • Pay TV reaches 36.2%.
  • Cinema reaches 24.5%.

Both absolute figures imply a measured audience of about 19.9 million people, a PPC Land calculation. The release does not say who is in that audience: no age range, no geography, no survey period and no sample size. A later passage describes the internet as "reaching more than 96%" of the measured audience, a slightly different formulation of the same statistic.

The comparison with spend is where the release becomes self-critical. Free-to-air television takes nearly half of tracked expenditure across nine months but reaches 72% of the measured audience, fifth among the touchpoints Nielsen lists. The internet reaches 96%. Out-of-home and DOOH reach 90.7%, and in-store touchpoints 95.5%, yet the release gives no spending figure for either. Why, then, does the fifth-ranked touchpoint by reach collect the largest budget? Nielsen itself cautions that "reach does not necessarily equate to time spent or advertising effectiveness." It provides no time-spent data to fill that gap.

Adrienne Wong, Nielsen Managing Director, Platform & Digital Asia, made the case for linking the two datasets. "Festive shopping isn't a single event. Consumers have different needs, priorities and purchasing considerations in the lead-up to celebrations, during the festivities themselves and afterwards," Wong said.

"For advertisers, understanding these behaviours is just as important as knowing where competitors are spending. A campaign might reach millions of people, but its relevance depends on whether the message connects with the right audience at the right moment," Wong added. "By bringing together advertising intelligence and consumer insights, Nielsen helps brands better understand their categories, identify what matters to their audiences and develop more relevant campaigns that inform smarter marketing decisions."

What the release does not establish

Several questions that matter for interpreting the ringgit figures go unanswered.

The valuation basis is the first. Expenditure tracking services can value placements at rate card prices or attempt to estimate what advertisers actually paid after discounts, and the two can differ substantially for television. The release does not say which approach produced the RM604.4 million.

The coverage of social and digital is the second. Nielsen does not say which platforms sit inside the RM186 million social media figure, how spend on those platforms is estimated, or whether search advertising, e-commerce marketplace ads or paid creator content are counted. Streaming television and connected TV do not appear as categories at all.

Third, there are no year-on-year comparisons. Without March 2025 figures, the release cannot show whether the 2026 festive season was larger or smaller than the last one, or whether social media's 29.1% nine-month share is rising.

Fourth, the release gives shares for January to September but no ringgit total for the period, and it gives no explanation for the two categories - Information Technology and Media - whose spending peaked after the festivals had ended.

Finally, the document is as much a product description as a data release. Its closing passages describe how combining Ad Intel with CMI can help brands "identify relevant audiences, refine their messaging and plan campaigns." Nielsen sells both products.

Why it matters for the marketing community

Nielsen's Malaysian analysis is a regional showcase for a product the company has been building out. In July 2026, Nielsen launched Ad Intel AI, a conversational layer on top of a platform that monitors 5.5 million brands across 23 media types and more than 90 markets. Ad Intel's core purpose is competitive: it estimates what rivals spend, where and when, the raw material for share of voice calculations. The Malaysian release leans heavily on that framing, repeatedly referring to "when competitors are investing."

The company is also expanding beyond measurement. In August, Nielsen agreed to acquire DoubleVerify in an all-cash deal valued at about $2.15 billion, with closing targeted for the first quarter of 2027. Combined, the businesses would sit across expenditure tracking, audience ratings and ad verification.

The contrast with Nielsen's US output is striking. In the United States, Nielsen's monthly data has been dominated by streaming: YouTube reached a record 15.8% of US TV time in August 2026, with streaming at 49.6% of all television use. The Malaysian release, by contrast, does not mention streaming once. Its television story is a broadcast story, built on free-to-air spend and a prime-time news bulletin.

For media owners, the category timings carry a practical consequence. Demand from retail and food advertisers clustered around February and March and fell away sharply in April, while technology and media advertisers arrived later. Inventory pressure in a festive year, on this evidence, does not land in a single week. Whether the same pattern holds in 2027, when Ramadan and Hari Raya move roughly eleven days earlier in the Gregorian calendar, is a question Nielsen's data will only answer next year.

Out-of-home inventory, which reaches 90.7% of the measured audience in CMI's figures, is also where much of the industry's buying infrastructure is changing. Globally, programmatic DOOH reached $1.339 billion in 2025, just 7% of digital out-of-home spend, according to WOO's figures. The Malaysian release gives OOH a reach figure but no share of spend, leaving its weight in festive budgets unmeasured.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Nielsen, through its Ad Intel expenditure tracking and Consumer & Media Insights survey data, with comments from Matty Lin, APAC Commercial Leader, and Adrienne Wong, Managing Director, Platform & Digital Asia. The figures concern advertisers, agencies and media owners in Malaysia, including free-to-air broadcaster TV3.

What: Tracked Malaysian ad spend reached RM604.4 million in March 2026, more than 20% above February. Free-to-air TV took RM271.0 million (44.8%), while social media rose 40% to RM186 million and digital 55.9% to RM52.1 million. Retail and food spend peaked in February and March and fell 53.5% and 30% respectively in April, while Information Technology and Media peaked in April. Across January to September, free-to-air TV held about 47.7% of tracked spend and social media 29.1%. CMI data shows the internet reaching 96% of the measured audience and free-to-air TV 72%.

When: Nielsen published the analysis on November 3, 2026. The spending data covers January to September 2026, with festive periods around Chinese New Year (February 17), Ramadan, Hari Raya Aidilfitri (late March) and Hari Raya Haji (May).

Where: Malaysia, with the release issued from Kuala Lumpur.

Why: The data shows that festive advertising in Malaysia does not peak at a single moment: categories spend at different stages, and social and digital channels grow fastest in festive months while television keeps the largest share. The release leaves open how the ringgit values are calculated, which platforms the social figure covers, and how 2026 compared with previous years.