TL;DR
- Brand Inside reported on 17 August 2026 that True Corporation's Routes to Roots project won the Creative Data Award at Thailand's Creative Excellence Awards 2026, run by the Creative Economy Agency.
- The project analysed anonymised True mobility data covering roughly 25 million Thai accounts and more than 80,000 foreign tourist accounts per month from August 2023 to July 2024, over 500 million trips.
- True, the Centre of Excellence in Social Design at Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Architecture and The Cloud identified 21 area clusters with tourism potential and piloted six as designed travel routes.
- The method dropped provincial administrative boundaries in favour of inter-city route systems that match how people actually move, against a Thai tourism sector Brand Inside reports is down 3.05% in visitor numbers.
- The source did not state whether the data or the route designs will be available to advertisers, and this is an award for a public-interest tourism project, not an ad product launch.
True Corporation's "Routes to Roots" project won the Creative Data Award at the Creative Excellence Awards 2026, the awards run by Thailand's Creative Economy Agency (CEA), according to a report published by Brand Inside on 17 August 2026. The project analysed anonymised mobility data covering more than 500 million trips across one full year, and used it to describe Thai tourism as a set of inter-city travel routes rather than as a map of provinces.
Two things are worth stating before anything else. This is an award for a public-interest tourism data project and it is not an advertising product launch. The part that transfers to marketing work is the method, not the dataset, because nothing in the reporting says the dataset is something an advertiser can obtain.
What the Routes to Roots project analysed, according to Brand Inside
Brand Inside reported on 17 August 2026 that Routes to Roots was a collaboration between True Corporation, the Centre of Excellence in Social Design at Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Architecture, and The Cloud. The analysis used anonymised mobility data from True mobile users, covering roughly 25 million Thai accounts per month and more than 80,000 foreign tourist accounts per month, over a full year running from August 2023 to July 2024. Added together, that came to more than 500 million trips.
The mobility data was combined with academic research into how people actually travel. From that combined picture the team identified 21 area clusters with tourism potential, and six of those were selected as pilot clusters and developed into travel routes tied to the identity and culture of each area. The report does not name the 21 areas and does not name the six pilot clusters, so this post does not name them either. Anyone who has seen a list of specific provinces attached to this project has seen it somewhere other than the source being cited here.
The scale and timeframe of the True mobility analysis in one table
Every figure in the table below is taken from the Brand Inside report of 17 August 2026 on the Routes to Roots project. None of it is estimated, averaged or extended beyond what was published.
| What was measured | As reported by Brand Inside on 17 August 2026 |
|---|---|
| Thai mobile accounts in the analysis | Roughly 25 million accounts per month |
| Foreign tourist accounts in the analysis | More than 80,000 accounts per month |
| Period covered | August 2023 to July 2024, a full year |
| Total trips analysed | More than 500 million trips |
| Clusters identified against clusters piloted | 21 clusters with tourism potential identified, 6 selected as pilots |
Why dropping provincial boundaries is the actual news in the True project
The methodological decision that Brand Inside describes in the Routes to Roots project is that the team set aside provincial administrative boundaries and worked instead with inter-city route systems reflecting how people actually move. That single choice is what makes the project interesting outside tourism policy.
Administrative boundaries exist for governance. They were drawn to allocate budgets, run elections and assign responsibility for roads, schools and permits. They were not drawn to describe demand. A traveller who crosses three provincial lines on one trip is having one journey, but a system that counts by province records that journey as activity in three separate places, with no memory of the fact that they were the same person on the same trip. Aggregate enough of those records and the resulting picture is arithmetically correct and behaviourally wrong.
Mobility data has the opposite property. It is weak at telling you why someone travelled and strong at telling you where they went next. A dataset built from trips rather than from locations preserves the sequence, and sequence is what turns a scatter of visits into a route. That is the mechanism underneath the project. It is also the reason the output was a set of route clusters rather than a ranking of provinces.
What True and Chulalongkorn University said about the project
Onuma Watanasuk, Head of GCEO Strategic Agenda and Employee Communication at True Corporation, told Brand Inside in the 17 August 2026 report that the role of telecoms in this era is not limited to building networks but extends to bringing mobility data forward to open up space for collaboration. Nattapong Punnoi, deputy director of the Centre of Excellence in Social Design at Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Architecture, said in the same report that the important question was using data to see tourism through a new lens, following the real travel system. Both quotes are translated from the Thai original.
Read plainly, those two statements describe the project as a data-sharing exercise between a telco, a university and a media partner, aimed at policy and area development. Neither statement, as reported, describes a commercial product, a data licence or an advertising application.
The Thai tourism context that the source itself provides
Brand Inside frames the Routes to Roots project against a Thai tourism sector facing a 3.05% decline in visitor numbers, which the report says has shifted the industry goal away from raising headcount and towards raising the value of each trip and spreading income out to communities. That figure is presented here exactly as the source presented it. It is a reported decline in visitor numbers, it is not broken down by region in the source, it is not a forecast, and it should not be repeated as a trend line or applied to any individual province or business.
The strategic shift the source describes, from volume to value per trip, is the reason a route-based view is useful to tourism policy at all. If the goal is more visitors, a province ranking is adequate. If the goal is more spending per visitor and wider distribution of that spending, then you need to know what a traveller does after the first stop, and that is a question about sequence.
What the Brand Inside report did not say
Being clear about the gaps matters more than usual on this story, because a telco mobility dataset is exactly the kind of thing that gets over-claimed once it reaches a marketing audience. The Brand Inside report of 17 August 2026 did not state any of the following.
- It did not name the six pilot clusters or the 21 candidate areas.
- It did not say whether the mobility data, the cluster definitions or the route designs will be made available to anyone outside the project, and it did not describe any commercial or advertising access to them.
- It did not say that True sells this data, and it did not describe an audience segment, a targeting product or a media offering built on it.
- It did not give a methodology document, a definition of what counts as one trip, or a margin of error.
- It did not break the 3.05% decline down by nationality, region or season.
Where the source is silent, this post stays silent. The honest position is that a Thai advertiser reading this today cannot buy anything from it.
Analysis: an administrative region and a movement corridor are different shapes
This section is analysis rather than reporting. Brand Inside did not write about advertising platforms, and the project is not an advertising project. What follows is the general mechanics of location targeting as they exist in the major platforms, set against the province-versus-corridor idea the True project used.
Location targeting in the large ad platforms is built from two shapes. The first is an administrative place: a country, a region or province, a city, a postal code. The second is a radius around a point you drop on a map. Google Ads and Meta both work this way, and both also draw a distinction that matters here, between people who are physically present in a place and people who are somewhere else but have shown interest in that place or are travelling to it. That presence-versus-interest distinction is the single setting most often left on a default that does not match the campaign's intent.
Neither of those two shapes is a corridor. A route between towns is a long thin thing that follows a road, and you cannot express it directly. The usual approximation is a chain of overlapping radii centred on the stops along the way, which is workable and is still an approximation. It over-covers the land on either side of the road and under-covers anyone who leaves the chain. Knowing that it is an approximation is the point, because a report that shows a radius cluster outperforming a province is not showing you a better place, it is showing you a shape that fits the behaviour more closely.
There is a second gap on the measurement side. Analytics platforms report geography the way the administrative map is drawn. In GA4 the geographic dimensions are country, region and city, derived from the visitor's location signal at the time of the session. That tells you where a session happened. It does not tell you that the same person was two cities away yesterday and will be two cities further tomorrow, because a web analytics property sees sessions on your property, not journeys across a country. Anyone who wants the sequence has to reconstruct it from their own first-party data, and most Thai advertisers have never set that up. If your reporting stack is still returning city rows when the business question is about travel patterns, that is a measurement design question before it is a media question, and it is the kind of thing worth resolving in your analytics setup rather than in a bid adjustment.
What this means for Thai marketers
The practical takeaway from the Routes to Roots project is a question rather than an action: does your geo-targeting match how your customers move, or does it match how Thailand is administered? For a Bangkok business serving Bangkok, those two are close enough that the question is uninteresting. For anything selling to people in motion, which covers hotels, restaurants, fuel and convenience retail, attractions, car rental and a large part of provincial retail, they can be very different.
Three checks are worth running in your own account this week. Open the location settings on your Google Ads campaigns and confirm whether you are targeting presence or presence plus interest, because for a destination business the interested-but-elsewhere audience is often the one you actually want, and for a walk-in business it is pure waste. Then look at your location report and ask whether the places delivering conversions sit along a route rather than inside the province you targeted. Finally, if you sell online as well as in person, check whether your ecommerce campaigns are inheriting a provincial geo split that was set up for a physical catchment and no longer describes anything.
None of that requires the True dataset. The corridor idea is free, and the evidence for whether it applies to your business is already sitting in your own conversion data by location.
FAQ: questions about True's Creative Data Award project
Can advertisers use True's mobility data for targeting?
The source did not say. Brand Inside reported that True opened mobility data for cross-sector collaboration on this project, and it said nothing about whether the data, the cluster definitions or the route designs will be made available to advertisers, sold, or licensed in any form. Treat any claim that you can buy or target on this data as unverified until True says so.
Does this change how I should set up Google Ads or Meta location targeting today?
No, nothing has changed in any ad platform as a result of this award. It is a reason to check whether your existing geo-targeting matches how your customers travel, which is a review of your own settings rather than a response to a platform change.
What is the Creative Data Award?
The Creative Data Award is one of the categories at the Creative Excellence Awards 2026, the awards programme run by Thailand's Creative Economy Agency (CEA), and Brand Inside reported on 17 August 2026 that the Routes to Roots project won it. The source did not describe the judging criteria or list the other entrants.
What time period did the True analysis cover?
The analysis covered one full year from August 2023 to July 2024, according to Brand Inside. Across that period it covered roughly 25 million Thai accounts per month and more than 80,000 foreign tourist accounts per month, amounting to more than 500 million trips.
Which provinces or routes were selected as the six pilot clusters?
The source did not name them. Brand Inside reported that 21 area clusters with tourism potential were identified and six were selected as pilots, but it did not identify either set, and this post will not guess at them.
If the corridor question landed and you now suspect your location targeting is drawn on the wrong map, the fix starts with measurement rather than media. Relevant Audience can review how your analytics and conversion tracking record location, and whether your reporting can answer a question about customer movement at all. The full details of the True project are in the original report by Brand Inside.
