Vinzo on the Spikes Asia Jury: Why Creative B2B Is Mongolia’s Next Frontier

Dec 21, 2025: On a late December Sunday afternoon, Ulaanbaatar seems to be holding its breath before the holidays. One of the upper floors in the city center office remains busy, with people working and visitors coming and going. In the office behind glass walls, a TV runs constantly, news, noise, and motion fill the space, as if the room refuses silence. Ganzorig Vanchig, affectionately called Vinzo, welcomes me in a comfortable hoodie and a beanie. Relaxed and friendly, Vinzo is a Mongolian marketing and communications leader celebrated for creating campaigns that genuinely aim to influence behavior rather than garner applause. Vinzo is proud to be chosen as a jury member for Spikes Asia 2026 in the Creative B2B category. This achievement is a special moment, especially as one of the few Mongolians to earn a spot through the Mongolian Marketing Association. While it’s a personal honor, it also sends a positive message: Mongolia’s creative industry is gradually understanding how to gain global recognition and maintain its place in these critical conversations.

The gate isn’t locked. It’s coded.

Spikes Asia isn’t just a festival; it’s a vibrant hub for Asia’s agencies, building credibility, shaping reputations, and fostering invaluable networks that can quietly open new doors in careers. However, the selection process can sometimes feel a bit circular. Often, jurors are those who have already received awards at the festival, creating what Vinzo calls the “chicken-or-egg” trap: if you haven’t won yet, you might find it harder to get invited into the key conversations where standards are set. And without that invitation, learning and growth can sometimes happen more slowly than for those who are already part of those essential rooms.

Mongolia has experienced this kind of international recognition before! Bilguun Munkhjargal, the founder of Whyze (who previously worked at Y&R), became Mongolia’s first Spikes winner and set a benchmark for what “global-level” success looks like. More recently, Enkhbayasgalan Tungalag, the founder of Viral, was chosen as a juror for the Cannes Lions 2025.

Vinzo doesn’t see recognition as a trophy but as a responsibility. “More than happiness, I feel responsibility.”

Creative B2B: where “boring” becomes expensive

“Creative B2B” sounds like something people politely ignore until they realize how much money lies there. Creative B2B is where brands sell trust: contracts, partnerships, procurement decisions, employer reputation, and institutional confidence. Not shopping carts, but ecosystems. Vinzo is blunt about why it matters now. Markets are crowded. Products blur. Services look identical. Quality becomes baseline. So differentiation stops being a marketing luxury and becomes a survival strategy.

“Innovation needs emotion,” he says.

Not because emotion is trendy, but because emotion is the fastest way humans decide what to trust. He gives an example from Mongolia that lands because it’s painfully familiar.

A company operating in a tough, regulated mining-supply space, with strong operations, compliance, and stable revenue, treated its reputation like decoration. They didn’t invest in communication. They didn’t invest in narrative. They believed contracts spoke for themselves. Then they tried to hire people. They couldn’t attract talent. They couldn’t convince people that the work was safe, stable, prestigious, and future-proof. They had the capability. They lacked meaning.

In modern markets, “we operate well” is not enough. People: clients, talent, partners, choose brands and companies that feel credible. And credibility, more than ever, is built publicly.

Mongolia’s bottleneck isn’t creativity. It’s a measurement.

If Creative B2B is the frontier, Vinzo argues Mongolia’s most significant constraint isn’t talent. It’s infrastructure. He points to a topic that sounds technical, but shapes investment decisions: measurement, especially TV measurement.

Brands don’t want to buy airtime. They want verified reach. They want defensible spend. They want to know what they paid for. Without trusted measurement, Mongolia becomes a higher-risk media market. And when risk rises, budgets either shrink or shift to markets with stronger reporting.

Vinzo points to Kazakhstan as a regional example of how measurement upgrades can change the game: when audiences are measurable, spending becomes easier to justify internally, especially for big brands. In his view, if Mongolia upgrades measurement standards, it could unlock bigger brand confidence, especially in TV-heavy budgets, creating more room for investment, larger campaigns, and a stronger creative economy.

The secret isn’t celebrities. It’s the customers' trust and truth.

As our conversation winds down, I ask him if there’s anything important I didn’t ask, something he wants to say anyway.

He pauses. Then he goes straight for the uncomfortable part. He says people keep asking for the “secret” of great marketing: famous faces, big money, flashy tricks. He thinks the industry has misunderstood the nature of competition. He describes sitting inside global creative spaces, Cannes especially, and noticing something that Mongolia still struggles to absorb: Brands aren’t obsessed with defeating each other. They’re obsessed with adding value. Here’s his voice, in Mongolian (lightly edited for readability):

“Би Каннын наадам дээр ‘өрсөлдөөн’ гэдэг үгийг нэг ч удаа сонсож байгаагүй. Одоо компаниуд хоорондоо алалцаж өрсөлдөхөөсөө илүү…харилцагчийн асуудлыг яаж шийдэх вэ, аз жаргал яаж өгөх вэ, нэмүү үнэ цэнэ яаж бүтээх вэ гэдэг дээр л өрсөлдөж байна.”

Then he goes after another habit: fake storytelling. Not “creative.” Not “styled.” Just manufactured. He says the campaigns that win commercially, not just aesthetically, aren’t built from fictional myths invented in meeting rooms. They’re built from real human stories. People who used the product. People who stayed loyal for decades. Customers who quietly financed the company’s growth through repeated trust.

And he’s almost irritated when he says it: Why do companies chase celebrities, when they’ve ignored the people who kept them alive for 20 or 30 years?

His advice is almost embarrassingly simple: Dig into your data. Mine your own history. Find the real stories already inside your brand.

Then tell them in the simplest possible form, photo, video, voice, or emotion. Make people laugh. Cry. Feel relief. Feel pride. But don’t lie because the core content has to be true.

“Эмоци хэрэгтэй. Тэгэхдээ үндсэн контент нь үнэн байх ёстой. Сэтгэлийг нь барьсан байхад бие нь хаа холдох вэ дээ.”

If you hold the heart, the rest follows. But only if what you’re having is real.

A jury seat isn’t a finish line. It’s a standard.

Vinzo’s selection isn’t important because it’s a headline. It’s important because it forces a question: Mongolia's creative industry keeps dodging: Are we here to look creative or to become a market the world can trust?

Biography

Ganzorig Vanchig is the founder of Bat Solution Partners, the nation’s leading branding agency of creative communications and strategy. He earned his dual master’s degrees in Australia and Japan. Ganzorig was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He serves as a member of the judging academy for the Global Teacher Prize in London. The prize includes a $1 million award and aims to highlight educators' impact on students and communities. Currently, he is a member of the executive committee of the Asia Pacific Down Syndrome Federation, a founding board member of Special Olympics Mongolia. He is active in the East Asia region. He established the Young Professionals’ Group, the first-ever mentorship program in Mongolia. This NGO aims to provide mentorship, guidance, and advice to young professionals across various fields. Ganzorig is a columnist as well as the host of the Syndicate Talk TV show. Recently, he made his debut as a film producer, with his films winning dozens of international awards and screening at the UN and UNESCO’s headquarters in New York, Geneva, and Paris. He has been invited to serve as a jury for the Down Syndrome International Film Festival in the USA.