Zalo Ads and ZNS for brands selling in Vietnam

Zalo carries something close to 78 million users in Vietnam and will not sell advertising to a foreign entity. The ad account, the Official Account verification and the payment all sit against a Vietnamese business licence and settle in dong, so the first decision in any Vietnam plan is whether the account lives under your own subsidiary or under a local partner you contract directly. I do not hold that account on your behalf, and any vendor offering to is offering you an asset you cannot take with you. What has to exist before a single ad runs: A verified Official Account with the blue tick, because an unverified OA cannot use the message types that make the channel worth having. A rich menu and an auto-reply tree written in Vietnamese. The Zalo Ads pixel on the site if there is one. And a decision about ZNS template families taken early, because each template is approved individually and approval is not instant. Buying attention: Zalo inventory is in-feed on the Zalo timeline, article ads, website ads, and form ads that collect a lead without leaving the app. Form ads carry most of the weight in Vietnam for anything with a considered purchase, and the reason is mundane: mobile pages served from European hosting are slow on Vietnamese networks and the form never sees the visitor. Ad review is strict and literal. Claims that pass in Italy get rejected here, so I write to that standard rather than appealing rejections afterwards. ZNS is not a newsletter: Zalo Notification Service exists for transactional messages, and its cost per send is low enough that brands are tempted to push promotions through it. The platform prices that behaviour into your OA quality score, which falls with every report and block, and a degraded score restricts sending volume before anybody in your office notices. So ZNS carries order states, bookings, service reminders and warranty notices. Promotion goes through advertising and through the OA broadcast, where it belongs. This is the distinction I argue about most often, and I do not concede it. What I turn down: Categories Zalo restricts or refuses, which I check before quoting rather than after. Brands with no Vietnamese-language response during Vietnamese business hours, because an unanswered OA chat in this market reads as the company being absent. Any request to run the account from an entity I control. And translation-based localisation: Vietnamese copy comes from a Vietnamese writer I brief and pay, named on the invoice, and that applies to ZNS template wording too, where tone drives block rate more than the offer does. Not part of this: Media spend and ZNS send fees, paid by you or your local partner. Company formation or licence work in Vietnam. Zalo Shop merchandising and order operations. Facebook, which most Vietnamese brands also run and which I am not the person to run for you. Any promise about conversion rate on a site I did not build. Who this suits and who it does not: It suits brands with an existing Vietnamese presence, an importer or distribution, and a reason for a customer to message them. It does not suit a first exploratory step into Southeast Asia, and it does not suit anyone who wants Vietnam handled at European unit economics because the CPMs look cheap. How results are counted: Cost per verified OA follower and per form lead, ZNS delivery and read rates against block rate, and OA quality score tracked weekly because it is the constraint that binds. Where you can pass back sales, I report cost per order and stop the placements that do not produce one.