How can advertisers capture attention when work and life blur together?

The workday no longer starts at 9am and ends at 5pm. Instead, it stretches, it fragments and it loops back on itself from the early-morning inbox checks, to the late-night meetings and the weekend catch-ups as people today constantly context-switch between work and their personal tasks.

According to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, workers today face an average of 275 interruptions a day, while meetings scheduled after 8pm are up 16% year-on-year. By 10pm, 29% of active workers are back in their inboxes, and nearly 20% of employees check their emails before noon on weekends.

The shift is especially pronounced in Southeast Asia where 84% of APAC workers say they lack enough time to do their work – 4% above the global average. Markets such as Indonesia and Thailand report the highest strain, with 88% of workers in both countries saying they struggle to keep up.

At the same time, 61% of APAC leaders say productivity must increase, 8% higher than the global average while underscoring the pressure placed on already stretched workdays. These behaviours show that blended work isn’t a temporary phase – it’s how people operate now.

“Consumers don’t experience their day in neat blocks anymore, and this is true across Asia more than anywhere else,” said Ryan Miles, international marketing director, Microsoft Advertising, in a conversation with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.

Blended lives are driving PC-first behaviour

As work spills into more hours and moments, laptops and PCs have become the backbone of daily routines. Windows continues to dominate as the primary operating system across Southeast Asia, with desktop OS market share reaching 84% in Indonesia, 77% in Thailand, 74% in Malaysia, and 71% in the Philippines. In Singapore, Windows accounts for 53% of desktop usage.

This dominance is matched by time spent online. Consumers in Southeast Asia spend between 3.30 and 4.28 hours per day online, with the Philippines and Malaysia leading the region. Microsoft audiences across these markets are also 12% to 18% more likely to spend six to 10 hours online daily compared to the average internet user.

Nick Seckold, regional vice president at Microsoft Advertising APAC, said these behaviours were first amplified during COVID-19, and is now part of daily life.

“When everyone was locked down and working from home five days a week, primarily on their laptops, we saw huge spikes in search volume as people were online more often,” Seckold told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.

“That behaviour is continuing to happen, even as people return to the office more often,” he added, saying that often people are on a Teams call with the video off, while shopping on other tabs at the same time.

Micro-moments are redefining consumer intent

What has changed most is not just where people are working, but how intent shows up. Work and personal life now unfold through dozens of short overlapping moments – from quick searches, to planning tasks, responding to messages or browsing between meetings.

“Work and life now play out in a series of short overlapping moments of work-life flow – moving between meetings, messages, planning, shopping and personal tasks, often outside traditional hours,” Miles said. “That’s changed what people expect from brands.”

Rather than demanding attention, consumers expect relevance, noting that audiences want brands to understand when they’re showing up and why. Microsoft’s global data on Copilot conversations reflects this shift.

Microsoft users are typically employed and affluent, making them attractive for advertisers in higher-consideration categories. While shopping and entertainment activity usually peaks on weekends, usage is spread across the workweek, signalling that discovery, planning and decision-making now happen continuously, not just during traditional leisure windows.

Signals from search, shopping and conversational behaviour provide clearer intent than demographics alone.

“Signals surfaced across search, shopping, and conversational behaviour – including how people use tools such as Copilot to plan, explore, and decide – give a clearer view of what someone is trying to do in that moment,” Miles said.

What this means for advertisers

For advertisers, the infinite workday creates new opportunities, but only if brands rethink how and when they show up. As work and personal life blur, the day is increasingly shaped by short, task-driven micro-moments rather than long stretches of focus. These moments range from quick searches and calendar checks to after-hours planning and light browsing between meetings, shifting when and how people are open to brand messages.

This fragmentation changes what effective advertising looks like. Attention-heavy formats are usually out of step, while snackable, utility-led creative content, fits more naturally into these moments.

Context also matters more than scale. Productivity platforms and PC environments allow brands to appear within task flows through native placements or relevant content integrations, reducing disruption and increasing usefulness. Generative AI further enables brands to adapt and scale creative efficiently across these micro-moments without losing relevance.

What is important for advertisers to note is that hybrid work has also made daily routines far less predictable – so the tried and tested methods of segmentation and audience understanding has to evolve. Nonetheless, office attendance does often peak earlier in the week, while flexible and remote work patterns are more common later on and after hours.

To keep pace, advertisers need omnichannel strategies that synchronise messaging across PC, mobile and connected TV, supported by dayparting and AI-led optimisation. Rather than chasing fixed behaviours, the focus shifts to identifying intent as it emerges throughout the day and showing up when it matters most.

Seckold points to Microsoft’s owned surfaces as an example of how brands can strike that balance. “If you're on Windows Edge with Bing as your default, whenever you type anything into the browser, Bing serves those results to you. If you use Discover, which is your news and content portal, you can curate all of that,” he said.

“When you open a browser, you get the MSN feed with articles you may have clicked on and you’ve curated that experience. You’ll see advertising through that, but we’re very careful about not overloading it,” he added, noting that brands are natively embedded into the content.

Microsoft is also seeing stronger advertiser interest in these placements, with the tech giant planning to open up more formats.

“MSN has been around for decades, but it has gone through a huge evolution and redesign. It is AI embedded and it’s a really intelligent platform that offers brands an opportunity,” Seckold explained.

Still, he stressed, these environments work best as part of a broader mix. “Your ads need to be part of an integrated marketing campaign because it’s an audience that you can’t reach necessarily anywhere else,” he said.

Adding to the point, Miles shared that when brands ignore context, they risk becoming part of the noise people are actively trying to manage.

“The reality for many workers today is constant interruption – short, fragmented moments, overlapping priorities, and rising cognitive loads,” Miles said.

“In that environment, advertising that shows up at the wrong time, or without relevance, doesn’t just underperform – it can actively erode trust.”

What’s next?

Looking ahead, Microsoft sees blended work habits becoming even more embedded, particularly across Asia. The next phase is not about more hours worked, but about how people manage fragmentation.

“As meetings, messages, planning and personal tasks compete for attention across the day, people are increasingly looking for support to help decide what matters now and what can be handled later,” Miles said.

Tools such as Copilot are already easing the burden by summarising long threads, drafting first passes and surfacing priorities. “That automation doesn’t replace human judgment, it creates space for it,” he said.

“Instead of spending energy on organising, chasing or catching up, people can focus more on decision-making, collaboration, and the moments that benefit from human input.”

For brands, that shift changes the nature of intent. Over time, intent will become more continuous and distributed with people planning, searching and exploring across the week, rather than concentrated in traditional peaks. Ultimately, a meaningful brand presence in the infinite workday will come down to restraint and relevance.

“Showing up more meaningfully starts with a shift in mindset. The most effective brands will stop trying to dominate attention and focus instead on supporting progress,” Miles said.

“When brands align with real moments of need, rather than interrupting them, they don’t just earn attention. They earn trust, and long-term commercial impact.”

This article was produced in partnership with Microsoft Advertising APAC.

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