Industry frontiers act as a barometer for current hotspots and trends, with deep engagement at the frontline being key to understanding the pulse of the digital era, as well as the most fundamental logic and urgent demands of the industry. How will AI deeply integrate into future marketing? What will the future relationship between humans and machines look like? How are different players using technology to drive marketing innovation? These questions were addressed during the conference, where platform providers and technology developers shared their insights.
Digital technology empowers smart business, supported by more precise algorithm systems that provide more specific and objective data solutions. Zhi Tianyu, the head of MiaoZhen Marketing Science Institute in Shanghai, who is a frontline player in digital technology, shared breakthroughs in marketing productivity in his keynote titled The Explosive Growth of Marketing Productivity — Welcoming the New Era of Generative Marketing.
The significance of artificial intelligence in marketing lies in AI breaking the bottlenecks of insight and creativity, leading to an explosion of marketing productivity. Marketing productivity is defined as Insight × Creativity × Media, and AI has the potential to revolutionize each of these elements. By analyzing customer needs in depth through data, continuously providing creative inspiration through brainstorming, and improving media efficiency through formats like 24-hour digital human live broadcasts, AI has dramatically enhanced marketing productivity. Currently, AI can already cover some services across six major marketing business modules: advertising, content, social media, e-commerce, user growth, and innovation management, with its development speed far surpassing initial expectations.
In this context, AI has brought changes to the marketing production relationship at various levels, including customers, employees, organizations, and ecosystems. At the customer level, AI grants equal access to information for both parties in a transaction, altering how companies communicate with customers and ultimately improving the customer experience. At the employee level, the introduction of AI tools can drastically reduce costs and increase efficiency, with reward and competition mechanisms encouraging employees to leverage AI capabilities. At the organizational level, top-down AI strategy implementation has restructured organizational relationships into more flat, agile, and simplified human-machine collaborations. At the ecosystem level, AI has fostered a more centralized and efficient industrial ecosystem, with the differentiation in core competitiveness increasingly becoming an important indicator of a company's survival.
Amid the AI wave, platform ecosystems such as those of Alipay and Tencent have been profoundly transformed by technology. Liu Zheng, Commercial Marketing Director at Alipay, discussed Alipay’s brand strategy and actions in digital marketing during his presentation titled How to Understand the Application of Digital Technology in Future Marketing.
In recent years, Alipay has adhered to the AI FIRST strategy, making good use of digital technology to integrate services into daily life. Alipay has developed a series of urban cultural and tourism activities, offering online services and enhancing offline experiences; launched a series of public health services, expanding public domain traffic into private domains and transactional areas for deep market penetration; and consistently promoted sustainable development by integrating green consumption concepts through initiatives like Ant Forest and brand collaborations. By leveraging digital technology, Alipay aims to shorten the operational distance and fully utilize the zero-field effect, ultimately transforming consumers into active participants in their everyday lives.
Similarly, Tencent focuses on creating more value through digital solutions. Xia Liangjun, Head of the Zhejiang and Anhui regions for Tencent Interactive Entertainment Brand and Digital Ecosystem Marketing, shared several case studies in his presentation titled Tencent Game Digital Marketing Communication Case Studies, highlighting examples where Tencent games have empowered cultural heritage preservation, tourism city branding, and the integration of the cultural and tourism industries. Through exploring various digital + development paths, Tencent Games has achieved highly efficient cross-industry collaborations by interpreting traditional city cultures digitally, injecting digital content into tourism scenes, and creating digital cultural tourism products that integrate the digital and physical realms.
Since the 1970s, humanity has experienced four waves of artificial intelligence, evolving from computational intelligence and perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence. Currently, large models represent new opportunities to address fundamental human needs. However, AI technologies such as large models can only reach their maximum value when applied and implemented effectively.
Fang Xudong, Senior Brand Manager at iFlytek, delivered a keynote titled Marketing Opportunities Brought by AI Large Models, in which he argued that we should look at brand marketing transformations in the AI era through the lens of first principles. The first principle of brand marketing is discovering and satisfying consumer needs, while strategies like planting the seed and weeding out are the specific tactics used in marketing. Planting the seed refers to stimulating consumer desire through word-of-mouth and content marketing, while weeding out refers to eliminating doubts and barriers in the purchasing process to achieve a sale. Brands should first identify consumer needs and then use methods like planting the seed and weeding out to meet these needs, while continually optimizing products and services to maintain a close connection with consumers. From print advertisements to the current era of smart marketing, technological progress has not altered the essence of planting the seed and weeding out.
Within the framework of unchanging marketing principles, AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) can provide value in brand marketing primarily by reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and improving quality, thus accelerating brand marketing cycles and helping companies better achieve their marketing objectives. Currently, large models can take on multiple roles in brand strategy, such as consultants, interviewees, guides, and inspirers; in content creation, they can act as producers and explorers, constantly expanding applications across various marketing scenarios. Fang Xudong called on individual users of large models to interact more with the models, asking questions and providing feedback, as every question you ask is the spark that ignites the future.
Wu Kai, Founder and CEO of Leo Guiyi Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., shared practical experiences from his company in a keynote titled Reconstructing the New Paradigm of Digital Marketing with AI. He explained how AI is breaking through traditional marketing pain points. He elaborated on the dual pitcher paradigm of human-AI collaboration in AI marketing applications. In this model, human pitchers and AI pitchers work together in a main driver + co-driver relationship, rather than the AI taking over completely in a fully autonomous mode. In the realm of traffic transactions, the wisdom, strategy, and courage of human pitchers should be leveraged as advantages, while AI can free humans from meaningless, repetitive tasks. In practical applications, this dual pitcher paradigm can increase efficiency by more than four times in areas such as short video ad placements. AI-driven search pitchers, with functions like intelligent keyword expansion, one-click filtering, and AI matching of creative content, can significantly improve effectiveness.