Vietnam Content Marketing
Vietnam is one of the fastest-changing markets in Asia. But reaching the people who live, work, and buy here takes more than simply translating an overseas campaign.
Vietnam Content Marketing explores how brands, creators, and businesses build trust, grow audiences, and tell better stories in Vietnam. Through conversations with marketers, founders, and industry leaders, we uncover what works, what doesn't, and what connects with Vietnam consumers across social media, video, podcast, search, and beyond.
It's practical, honest, and focused on the realities of doing business in this market. Whether you're building a local brand, entering Vietnam for the first time, or trying to understand where the industry is heading, this show gives you the ideas and insights to create content that actually makes an impact.
I'm Niall Mackay from Seven Million Bikes Podcast and Saigon Podcast Studio, and this is Vietnam Content Marketing.
Vietnam Content Marketing
Why Short-Form Content Isn't Enough (And What's Missing From It)
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"The long form is necessary in order to get the full scope of everything, and the clip should feed curiosity enough to get the person to engage with the long form."
That's Carey, and it's the exact line that sparked this whole episode for me.
In this conversation, Carey and I got into why everything in media feels like it's "on fire" right now — constant tension, constant urgency — and why that pressure pushes so many creators toward short-form content without thinking about what it's actually for. We talked about what gets lost when clips try to stand alone, why a clip's real job is to spark curiosity instead of satisfy it, and how to actually build a bridge between your short-form content and your long-form work.
Carey also joined me here at Saigon Podcast Studio as part of the VPW crew for another episode of Outside the Ring — so there's a bit of a fun studio moment in here too.
5 Key Takeaways
- Media is built on manufactured tension. Nothing feels calm anymore — everything is framed as urgent or dramatic, and that pressure shapes how creators think about content.
- Short-form content can't carry the full story. A clip can spark a reaction, but it doesn't have room for context, nuance, or the reasoning behind an idea.
- A clip's job is to raise a question, not answer one. Clips that feel "complete" give people no reason to seek out more.
- Long-form content is where trust actually gets built. It's the only format with enough room to explain the "why" behind the "what."
- The best content strategy connects both formats. Short-form content should function as a doorway to long-form — not a replacement for it.
5 Chapters
- [00:00] Intro — Why Everything Feels Like It's On Fire
- [06:15] The Trap of Chasing Short-Form Content
- [13:40] What Gets Lost Without Long-Form
- [21:05] Clips Should Spark Curiosity, Not Satisfy It
- [25:30] Wrap-Up — Welcoming Outside the Ring to the Studio
This episode is sponsored by Saigon Podcast Studio, premium podcast recording space right in the heart of District 1 Saigon. Whether you're launching your first show, recording interviews, or creating professional audio and video content, Saigon Podcast Studio gives you the space, equipment, and support to sound and look your best. Come by for a free tour of the studio and see where your next great episode could be recorded. The link is in the show notes. Carrie, let's get started with our rapid fire openers. Same questions every week. Quick answers. First question: what is the best piece of content marketing advice you've ever been given?
SPEAKER_01Consistency is key. Post regularly, try anything, just throw it at the wall. The worst thing you can do is to stop. Listen to the comments heavily.
SPEAKER_00What's the most important metric?
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna be shallow and say views. The more the more views, the better. But engagement is great, but views for me is is the most important.
SPEAKER_00And if you were to give someone advice who's starting tomorrow from zero, what advice would you give them?
SPEAKER_01Just start. Start creating, start editing, start posting. Don't be married to ideas. Just start.
SPEAKER_00And last one, podcasts. Great for content marketing. Why or why not?
SPEAKER_01Oh, it's wonderful. You get to learn about someone's personality, you get to have an in-depth conversation, you get insight into who they are. So for me, I think podcasting is an amazing way to market.
SPEAKER_00Now, in 2017, you watched Vietnam Pro Wrestling on Judo Mat, very small audience. Now you're at the stage where you've had a run of over 15 sold-out shows, named by V etcetera as one of the fastest or the fastest growing sports organization in Vietnam. Wrestling is a sport most people in Vietnam don't really know much about. So how have you been able to use content marketing to turn this into an almost household name now and grow the sport so dramatically?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think like the the first thing is, you know, with Vietnam Pro Wrestling, we are the country's first and official kind of pro wrestling promotion. But I think a big thing from the start, from when the guys started, the thing that I that always stood out to me was how unique they are. So as you mentioned, like I met the guys first when they were wrestling on dirty judo mats, you know, and at that point they had no ring, there was just 12 of their friends, and I happened to stumble across them on Facebook and saw that, you know, despite the lack of production value, they had a lot of heart and they had something that they could offer. In 2018, I went back to Canada and remained kind of seeing them via social media. But when I returned, I, you know, reached out to them during lockdowns. I asked if they needed commentary. And from there, my role kind of with VPW started to grow. But one of the things that I find most exciting is that Vietnam pro wrestling, or at least Vietnamese-style pro wrestling, it's yet to be defined. There's there's Mexican style, there's Japanese style, there's American style. But with Vietnam, we have the ability to kind of sculpt it and shape it however we like. And so I think from a content perspective, the fun thing has been to try to create a product that resonates with locals and expats alike, to try to create characters that resonate with people that are a reflection of their culture and their interests, and to just give people something that's new, family-friendly, audience-facing. And with our content, we really try to just show people that Vietnam Pro Wrestling is a professional wrestling promotion, but more importantly, it's the best night out you can have in Vietnam.
SPEAKER_00I agree with that. I absolutely love it. I was never a wrestling fan growing up. When you mentioned about creating the characters, that is something you know, all the wrestlers have their own all their own characters. And then you created one for yourself. You said you started as a commentator, and then I remember I when I met with you before you'd ever before the expat had ever debuted, and then you created this character called The Expat, which I've seen now in the shows is absolutely beloved. How important is creating characters, not just for yourself, but for the wrestlers? How important is that for the stories, and then how important is it for content marketing, not just in the ring?
SPEAKER_01Sure. So, in terms of my own character, so my name is actually Carrie, but my character name is Xavier Patrick's, aka the expat. And one of the things I realized was when I first joined them as ring announcer, the the guys understandably wanted me to be very orthodox in how I did it. You know, I was in my gray suit, stood up straight, used the deep resonant voice, and I kind of just stayed in the background. And one of the things I realized was that the audience wasn't necessarily responding to that type of delivery. It felt almost stale, or maybe, maybe I just wasn't as good as the people that I was trying to emulate. You know, the like the Michael buffers, the Bruce buffers that do it professionally. So I started to realize like, I think I need to create a character that speaks to the audience that we had. And at that point, we had, you know, a lot of expats in the crowd. So I just leaned in hard and thought, well, I want to be a reflection of them. So I literally became Xavier Patrick's the expat. And when it comes to our roster, we try to empower them to kind of create their own characters. And myself alongside our head of creative Jody, we try to help sculpt them so that the guys can come out and look larger than life. The audience can resonate with them, and they are interested in them. So from a content perspective, our big thing is the bigger the character, the better. And that doesn't mean like physically bigger. It means presentation. When they enter, they the audience should know exactly who their character is, whether they're good or bad, whether they're comedic, whether they're more serious. The their outfits, their entrance music should speak to the crowd. And with content, we try to capture the same thing. We try to tell the story of who these people are inside the ring. And we do our best to make sure that people have some level of attachment to them or disliking to them. The worst thing in pro wrestling is indifference. So for us, it's all about creating big, bold, strong characters that allow our guys to kind of get out of their shell and become the best versions of themselves.
SPEAKER_00And have you seen that translate into content marketing?
SPEAKER_01Oh, a hundred percent. For content, for example, we are always trying to, when it comes to matches, for example, we always try to accentuate the strengths and hide the weaknesses. So for example, we aren't WWE, right? We're not New Japan pro wrestling. We're not AEW in the US. We're VPW. But with that, one of the things that we've did, especially in building our content library, was we started to clip and only show the strengths and only show the moments that really accentuate our guys' characters. So the content became almost like a filter for our guys to look their best in terms of their movesets in the ring, but also their characters. We find the moments where the character comes through and the audience can go, oh, that person's a rapper, or that person's the hero, or that person's like the muscular villain. And we do our best to try to use contents to clip and accentuate those strengths. And for us, that was a huge growth point. And when we started to clip and only show the strengths, that started to directly show our progress with our live event ticket sales.
SPEAKER_00So you use the storylines, you use the characters to create these short clips. How do the short clips help sell tickets and sell out 15 shows in a row?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, the big thing I would say is that one attention spans can only take so much in today's day and age, right? People swipe quickly. So the short clips, again, if we're showing someone's strengths or showing someone in the character pose that's stands out, that person on the other side is more likely to stay in and watch that clip because it's it stands out. Our product is meant to be a celebration of Vietnamese culture, but amplified. So that's the one thing is that it allowed our guys to look like big stars without us overexposing them. And that was important. Nowadays, we use long-form content. We have full libraries of full matches. But in the early days, what had happened was it felt like audiences got given almost like an appetizer to the show. And then they would come see the full thing. And that was the only place they could see the full show at that time. Now with our full videos, you can get that all online. But it the it was almost like multiple different trailers were being created in the clips. And it made people curious about where is this show? How do I get a ticket? And we started to see the correlation between those clips numbers going up and our ticket sales going up.
SPEAKER_00In 2023, you reached out to Chris Jericho, one of the biggest names from wrestling, WWE, and it ended up with you and Rocky, the founder of VPW, being on his show, the Talk to Jericho podcast, sharing the VPW story for a full hour. What made you reach out to one of the biggest wrestling stars and want to be on his podcast?
SPEAKER_01Shameless Plug. The documentary that came out of that podcast, Viet Slam, Squashing the Cultural Gap, it's out now. I kind of cover a little bit of that, and I'm happy to cover it here as well. So what ended up happening was I was just working with the guys mainly as kind of an outside advisor, and I was helping with the ring announcing. But at that point, I felt really no need and didn't have necessarily the time or energy to really fully commit to helping VPEW beyond what I was at that time. But what I started to notice was that our guys kept running into roadblocks, things that, you know, opportunities that would come their way and then kind of be pulled away from them. And I realized that I might not have the finance to be able to change these guys' lives or to be able to grow this company or scale it to the way the degree I thought it could be. But I was a little bit kind of crazy in my ability to think outside the box and just reach, you know, go big. So I thought of a list of podcasts that might work well to share our guy's story. One of the most compelling things about Vietnam Pro Wrestling is our guy's story. They came from nothing. They've slowly built themselves up through community. They were able to fund getting a professional wrestling ring, and they're really trying to change Vietnam for the better by bringing professional wrestling, a family-friendly form of entertainment to the country. So I love that it resonated with me. And I thought, I guarantee there's at least someone out there in the wrestling world that has a podcast in the wrestling sphere that would love this story. And I thought, who would be the most insane person to reach out to? And the first person was Chris Jericho. So I kind of looked around, found on like his Web is Jericho website a little contact us. I sent a cold email outlining the story I just shared. Like these guys are trying to change history. This is an amazing opportunity. Chris actually was born 45 minutes from where I where I was in Canada. I'm also Canadian. He was born in Winnipeg. I was born in Kenora. So there's that little kind of Canadian connection. And I just shared that story. And thankfully, his producer Stacy got back and said, Chris would love to have you on. And so that was really a huge turning point for us because it reminded me that as much as Vietnam Pro Wrestling is live events and our content, that's an important thing. The most important thing, I think, from a marketing standpoint is the authentic story. You know, these guys are doing everything in their power to defy the impossible. They're trying to break down cultural barriers, family barriers, economic barriers, and even just themselves, the the all the resilience they have to have in order to keep pushing forward. And so by going on the Talk is Jericho podcast, I mean that essentially changed my life and their lives forever.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And did you understand at the time how big one podcast appearance could be? That's a good question.
SPEAKER_01So the way I'd look at it is this I did not understand how big it could be, but I treated the episode like it could be big. So what I mean by that is I worked with Rocky in terms of getting him, you know, to uh wrapping his mind around essentially like what the interview might look like. It's not a matter of coaching, it's almost like I essentially made a playbook of here's the history of VPW, here's how the conversation might go, and here's some things we might want to touch on to really showcase VPW at the highest level. I think like preparation for any kind of discussion at that level is important. And what the other thing I told Rocky was, you know, he's gonna have a hard time bragging about some of his achievements. And that I I get that. If someone's like, you're the founder, you've brought wrestling to Vietnam, it might be difficult for Rocky to kind of like step in and share the gravitas, if you will, of his accolades. And so I just put him at comfort and I said, you know, you can tag me in, just like wrestling. Whenever you feel like, you know, there's something that I you want me to add context or puff him up a bit, I can do that. And and that really served us well, where Rocky was the face, he was the story. And I kind of became almost what I'd say is like a historian contextualizer. But so I treated this like it was going to be the biggest moment, but I didn't expect that within an hour or so after the interview that then Chris would message me and say via email, I want to make a movie about this. Like it happened that fast where he expressed an interest. But I do think that it's a testament to what Rocky and I did beforehand. We prepared big and we treated this like the Super Bowl, the World Cup, you know? This was big.
SPEAKER_00It's crazy to see just what a difference one podcast can make.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's it's amazing. The other thing I'll also say is that when I knew I was gonna be a guest on the podcast, obviously I felt a little bit like the our other wrestlers were being a bit over overshadowed, right? Because they are also the story. So what I had each of them do, I said, listen, if you guys want to send a message to Jericho, why don't we film them and it's just you to camera, and I'll compile a folder and we'll privately share. We don't need to make this public. I'll just send him the Google Drive folder and you guys can send your message to Jericho. So each of them took the time to film and share their kind of like gratitude towards him, his career, what he meant to them. And I sent that to him the day before the interview. And I think that also was something that helped our relationship kind of like bloom between Chris, myself, and VPW, because he was able to, you know, be given uh gratitude in advance of the interview. But that to me was really important because, like I said, I'm a Canadian here about to talk about Vietnam pro wrestling. It didn't feel fair, so I was really happy that our guys had the ability to kind of address him personally and to have their messages seen by him.
SPEAKER_00So now VPW has its own podcast. I'm really excited to say Outside the Ring, hosted by Fung Nam from Saigon TU, and it's also recorded right here in Saigon Podcast Studio. I reached out to you after I went to one of your shows. I think it I'd been to one before, a few years before, and then I went again about a year ago, and I was just the energy in the room was amazing. It was just that it got me. I got I got it for the first time. I'd not been into wrestling growing up at all. My friend had been, I never really got it. I'd been to the show before, I guess I just didn't really get it. And then I went and I just looked around and I saw the audience reacting, felt the energy, the characters, I guess, the storylines, and I just loved it. And I reached out to you and I was like, let's do a podcast together. This will be amazing. Why do you think a podcast is so good for VPW?
SPEAKER_01Well, that's a good question. I mean, we we are living in a time now where wrestling is kind of exposed, where we have a Netflix WWE Unreal, you get a full behind the scenes, you get to learn about the people behind the characters, you get to see what life is like as a wrestler, not just in the ring, but outside of the ring. And I think one of our barriers to entry here has been that for so long our guys might have been perceived to the general public as almost like wannabes. And I guess anyone trying to do something new anywhere has to start as a wannabe because you're the first. So we had our guys with their over-the-top characters. They were, you know, big personalities. But what I we found was that the audience felt like they didn't fully connect to them because they didn't know who they were in real life. So when we talked about doing a podcast, the the big goal with that was how do we allow the audience to understand who these people are behind the scenes and form a personal connection with them, not just as wrestlers, but as people. And I think the podcast has done really well with that. Like one of our big focuses is on having the guys talk about their top fives or favorite moments. And I think it's important for people in Vietnam and beyond to realize that they all started like you. They were fans. They were, they were people watching WWE and saying, man, I wish I had the opportunity to do this. And now they are. So for us, the podcast has served as a great kind of bridge between who our guys are inside the ring and who they are outside the ring. And our fans get to learn a little bit about who they are. And also, long term, that would that will allow us to recruit easier because people will identify with them through the podcast.
SPEAKER_00And one thing was you made a decision early on, I know, to do the podcast in Vietnamese. And I think it would be so easy to do it in English. I know I make the same mistakes. We're doing this podcast in English right now, we're talking about Vietnam. And so, as a non-native speaker, as non-Vietnamese, I think it just would have been really easy for you to be like, okay, I'm gonna be the host, I'm gonna do it, we're gonna be in English, we're gonna reach out to all the expats. We have a lot of expat audience in our show. Why did you choose to do it in Vietnamese?
SPEAKER_01So, for to give context, a Vietnam pro wrestling audience is, you know, we have a huge amount of expats and we have locals as well. I think for the expats, they all we they like our show because it's a wrestling event. They love our guys, and no matter their size, no matter who they are, they are on board because it's just such a fun night out. I think for our Vietnamese audience, again, there is that barrier of who does this person think he is? Why are they dressed up in this mask or these big outfits or acting really, you know, in an extroverted manner? Who do they think they are? You know, and I get that. So what what we really wanted to target was a Vietnamese audience. We want our guys to connect with locals here so that they can see, like I said earlier, that they're just like them. So for us, it was always a no-brainer. Like it needed to be in Vietnamese language for a Vietnamese audience and to build that bridge of connecting our talent to the public. And I think it's worked really well. I mean, the clips have gone viral multiple times. The stories, we get a lot of engagement with them, and that's important as well. Whether it's good or bad, anytime you say a top three, you get engagement because people will will debate it. But for us, the Vietnamese language is a focus, and even long term, we just launched doing Vietnamese commentary on our full matches the first time ever. And that was important for us as well because we really want to become a household name. We want VPW to equate to WWE, but in Vietnam. And the best way and the only way, to be honest with you, to do that is to do it in Vietnamese language.
SPEAKER_00And it's been amazing having Fung Nam here in the studio from Saigon to you. How has the reaction been from people like Fung Nam and the wrestlers coming into a podcast environment? Because I know from speaking to them when they're here, for most of them, I think it's their first time ever doing a podcast, never mind coming into a podcast studio.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, I think for them they they feel honored because they're given a platform where they get to share their stories and they know that the person interviewing them, Fung Nam, is interested in having their story told to the best of their abilities. So for our talent, it's great. And I also think there's a lot of warming in that needs to happen with it. So you can probably tell when they first are in the chair, it takes a bit to warm up, but I really do think that they enjoy having the ability to share their own individual stories. Every single one of them came into VPW in a similar way, but also a different manner. So it's been it's been nice for me to be a fly in the wall for those interviews and to get to see the guy shine and to be able to tell people their individual story.
SPEAKER_00It's definitely one of my highlights from having this studio is the memories of having the studio packed full of wrestlers. It's been so fun.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's the best. No, it's it's been an honor to be here and to to have them, you know, to for them to be given a comfortable platform to share who they are.
SPEAKER_00Now I know as a OG podcaster, as I like to call myself, that when people think of podcasts, they think of audio. And I love that, and they should. And your podcast is available for audio. But what a lot of people do or don't realize, because everyone's different, some people don't realize a podcast can be any medium, so it can be TikTok. I know for a fact I read a report last year that a lot of people think of a podcast as anything with a microphone. So they see something on TikTok, it's a podcast. So it can be the audio, it can be the short clips that we've talked about, and they do really well, but it also can be the long form on YouTube. And I think we are all so obsessed with short form content these days. Like you said, we there's I I don't fully agree that we all have short attention spans. We have short attention spans when we're when we're scrolling, when we choose to do that activity, but people are still reading books, they're still watching movies. As we know, the movies can be three hours long. People will give it their full attention span, and they are still watching YouTube videos. Your videos are amazing. You obviously, so when you do the podcast here, you do the audio, then you clip it all up. How are the how are the YouTube videos performing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they're doing really well for us. I I think the great thing about it is that with any long form content, it gives the person being interviewed, the interviewer, and then the person watching time to like delve into a long form conversation. I know one of our strategies was. To begin was to actually put in the title of the videos things that we allude to from the mainstream to help build engagement. So, for example, let's say the person talks about John Cena, refers to WWE. We'd have the title of the podcast and put like John John Cena, WWE. I think for people, when they stumble across that, they're excited to see these topics explored. The other thing I'd say is that with it being in Vietnamese language, we wanted to achieve two things. And the long form does both of these. The first half is the story of the wrestler. How can we best get that talent to communicate who they are, how they got into wrestling, a little bit about their character, their highlights, focus the first half on them. And then the other half is what I call barbershop talk. So that's the classic like people debating Man U versus Man City. In an American context, it could be like the Jets versus the Giants and football. It's people who are debating who's the best, who's the worst. And so I wanted to also dedicate the second half to that, where people can, for the first time, because there's no other podcast that I know of doing this in Vietnam and long form content. You can listen to people debate or at least make top three selections of the best and the worst. And that to me, I think is why people gravitate towards the long form. They get to not only learn about the person, but they learn about their opinions. And we try our best to make sure that the opinions are really strong because that drives engagement. And if I say AJ Styles is the greatest high flyer of all time, I am throwing out an opinion that others can quickly debate in the comment section. So for a YouTube perspective, I think our numbers are doing well, but it's also a testament to the format that we've laid out for our guys, which is that 50-50, 50% personal, 50% you, you know, barbershop talk.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. One of the things that I get a lot is I say a lot, but often, is people say we just want to make short form clips. Why is it better? I always say to people it's not possible really. Why is it not possible to just come in and create some short form clips? Why do you have to do the long form to get the short form?
SPEAKER_01If the focus is only on short form clips, it kind of alters the focus of the interview, which is to always be clippable. And so you're losing the ability to just get into that flow state of a conversation. So, and I honestly believe that some of our best clips, even though let's say it's a top three, they are still engaging because the person has been warmed into the conversation at that point. Like I said, it for us is the second half where we do that type of content. And the reason is is when someone's talking about themselves, they can get comfortable and come and feel at ease. So then when you're looking for more clippable content, they are already in that comfortable state, but you can't get there unless they're feeling comfortable. So I think long form is necessary to get the atmosphere you need to create clips afterwards. But if the clips is the only thing you're focused on, it's very inorganic. And it will be it'll be felt that way as a viewer.
SPEAKER_00I was literally about to say the same thing. It would be inauthentic. Because I've seen it looks like an ad. Have you seen this when you see people and you're like, I can tell you've just started speaking. Right. Like this video has been made of this content. It's kind of like, okay, action, say the question. I'm gonna say the answer. It's so inorganic, inauthentic, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's two-staged. And I think that even in short form clips, you want the person to still come across authentic. I I notice it a lot when it comes to sports content in relation to giving like hot takes, you know, where you can tell the the directive is short clips that will go viral. So the entire long form segment, if you ever go to YouTube and watch some of these long form segments where you're seeing these clips taken from, the person is just there, it's almost like they're never cool. They're always on fire. Everything is just a moment to create, you know, tension. And so, anyways, long story short, I do think, yes, the long form is necessary in order to get the full scope of everything. And the clip should feed curiosity enough to get the person to engage with the long form.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Carrie, thank you so much for coming on VNAM Content Marketing. I'm really excited to have the VPW guys back in here in Saigon Podcast Studio for another episode of Outside the Ring.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. And it's an honor to have the podcast done here at the Saigon Podcast Studio.