Regulatory crackdowns and trade barriers threaten growth—but its consumer appeal remains strong.

China’s Q4 spending reinforced platform consolidation, as advertisers concentrated budgets on large platforms with data, scale, and commerce integration.

China’s ad rebound remains narrow; Q4 spending stabilized, but concentrated in low-risk, performance-driven channels—signaling a cautious market entering 2026.

Global ad spending has steadied after a turbulent year, setting the stage for modest acceleration in 2026. Digital is still the main engine, but traditional media’s rebound will add lift as markets stabilize.

Singles Day transactions in China rose 17.6% YoY to 1.7 trillion yuan ($240 billion), according to Syntun, marking a slowdown from last year’s 26.6% gain despite extended campaigns and heavy promotions from Alibaba and JD.com. Platforms poured billions into vouchers and discounts, but longer sale periods diluted urgency and limited impact. The event’s waning momentum highlights China’s broader economic challenges—rising frugality, youth unemployment, and deflationary pressures. To reignite excitement, platforms may need to move away from drawn-out promotions toward shorter, high-impact campaigns that restore Singles Day’s original urgency and appeal.

This year’s Singles’ Day sales period will be the longest yet as Chinese companies look to maximize revenues. JD.com, Xiaohongshu, and ByteDance's Douyin are among those hoping to get a head start over sale originator, Alibaba. Whether this year’s Singles’ Day turns into a price war depends on how strictly Beijing chooses to stem “disorderly” competition in the retail sector. While the government is unlikely to apply new competition guidelines too strictly this Singles Day, given the event’s importance to businesses and its role as a barometer of consumer confidence, the rules will inform how Alibaba, JD.com, and their peers approach pricing in the future.

Alibaba released two cutting-edge additions to its Qwen 3 large language model (LLM) that are ripe for enterprise application.Qwen3-Omni gives enterprises a rare mix of flexibility, cost savings, and global reach that many proprietary models can’t match. Qwen3-Max could push Alibaba into the frontier of agentic AI, combining massive scale with code-generation tools that could rival other developer-first models. For CMOs, Qwen3-Omni’s multilingual and multimodal skills could power richer customer interactions and unlock real-time insights from video, audio, and text data.

Asia-Pacific ad spending growth will decelerate in 2025 amid tariff pressures, with digital and mobile driving growth. China faces headwinds, India enjoys rapid growth, and retail media expands and reshapes ad strategies across the region.

An intense price war, new entrants, and new investments are fueling China’s booming instant commerce sector. Sales are expected to outpace total retail ecommerce, making lower-tier cities the next battleground.

Asia-Pacific has the largest retail and ecommerce sales in the world. While China continues to dominate global ecommerce share, India and Southeast Asia are increasingly driving growth. As consumer sentiment improves in China, the retail sales gap with the first-place US will narrow in the coming years.

The news: Nvidia is facing a new obstacle in its ability to sell chips to China—Chinese authorities are urging ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, and others to halt purchases of Nvidia hardware. This follows an agreement between President Donald Trump, Nvidia, and AMD that requires the two companies give the US government a 15% cut of Chinese chip revenues in exchange for permission to sell hardware there, per Bloomberg. Our take: ability to develop and deploy AI models for things like algorithm recommendations, content moderation, and generative AI (genAI) features. Marketers should diversify their AI-powered marketing tools to stay ahead if TikTok’s ad products and UX features develop more slowly.

The news: OpenAI is bringing its newest models to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the first time, marking a major milestone in the ongoing battle for AI cloud dominance. Its open-weight models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b—available via Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker AI platforms—are able to handle complicated text-based operations and integrate into cloud-based systems. Our take: OpenAI’s models are getting easier to access, meaning lower costs and fewer technical hurdles to trying powerful AI tools. AWS customers should start testing oss-120b and oss-20b for things like generating subject lines, social copy, and campaign variations and explore ways to fine-tune the models with company data.

Digital’s rapid adoption in recent years has made it the dominant medium with which people spend time in China, Japan, and South Korea, with consumption booming in India.

Payment processing solutions from major US digital commerce platforms are maturing and capturing a greater share of their retail ecommerce sales. Here’s how five platforms are approaching the payment facilitator (payfac) model to catapult their growth.

China is a global leader in online shopping, with high digital buyer and retail ecommerce penetration. Shoppers are comfortable buying luxury goods online and embracing livestreaming commerce.

The news: Amazon is testing humanoid delivery robots, per The Information, which could work in tandem with human drivers or as part of an autonomous fleet of delivery vehicles. The humanoid robotics team is working on incorporating large language models (LLMs) from Chinese companies DeepSeek and Alibaba so the bots can contextualize real-world surroundings. Our take: Delivery bots could help with heavy loads and ease the burden on human drivers, but Amazon might be better served with a less human form factor, such as a platform with walking legs to carry packages. The focus on humanoids could limit functionality, and bringing the uncanny valley to consumers’ front door could be off-putting.

The outlook for retail media ad spending remains bright throughout most of the world, even as ad budgets are increasingly constrained in the face of economic storm clouds.

Alibaba and JD.com embark on ambitious expansions despite challenging conditions: Both are making expensive delivery investments that could worsen China’s price wars.

China’s AI agents, such as Manus, can tackle complex tasks with minimal human intervention. That’s helping accelerate the global arms race—nearly 7 in 10 Asia-Pacific decision-makers expect AI agents to bring major disruptions to their companies within 18 months.

Digital’s share of total media ad spending in Asia-Pacific will reach a milestone in 2025, surpassing $200 billion for the first time. The region’s digital ad spending will increase 8.6%, led by India, while China’s growth will slip noticeably amid the country’s economic struggles before a rebound the following year.