The Asia-Pacific retail ecommerce sector is both dynamic and volatile. While China and Japan are slowing, South Korea is growing rapidly, and emerging markets like Southeast Asia and India are showing robust growth and untapped potential.

At $22.25 billion, digital advertising is advancing unabated in Latin America this year. Double-digit gains in video and retail media ad spending, as well as improving economic conditions in Brazil and Mexico, will help take the regional market to new heights. Here are the latest trends you need to know.

Despite a slow start, foreign sanctions, and tight digital regulations, generative AI is emerging as a significant force in China.

As China’s retail media advertising market begins to mature, off-site channels—including WeChat and Douyin, TikTok's sister app in China—will increasingly drive growth.

Digital, traditional, and total media ad spending growth will all accelerate in 2024, although only modestly. The outlook has stabilized for most countries and regions, even if spectacular growth is harder than ever to find.

The ad spending winter of 2022 and early 2023 was mild and short-lived, as we predicted. And after a solid H2 2023, things are looking up across the board for 2024.

In China, ecommerce channel ad spending represents over 38% of total digital ad spending, and ecommerce search spending accounts for 64.0% of total search. Could the US figures reach similar heights?

The threat of a TikTok ban is enough to make waves: ByteDance, Meta, and Chinese competitor Kuaishou are all taking steps to anticipate a ban.

It will be another turbulent year for social media in Latin America. As the number of users nears 400 million, declines at Facebook and Twitter will have profound, long-lasting implications for the region’s two biggest markets: Brazil and Mexico.

Amid global economic gloom, Asia-Pacific remains a region of digital opportunities in 2023, highlighted by the increasing momentum of the metaverse in China, surging retail sales in India, and burgeoning livestream commerce in Indonesia.

A jarring deceleration in ad spending growth has shaken the advertising industry in many parts of the world. However, this softness is not universal, and it is likely to be short-lived.

China’s total media ad spending and digital ad spending will both grow at their lowest rates since we began tracking them in 2012, but the ad industry is nonetheless set for an eventful year in the world’s second-largest market.

In 2022, China’s tech sector will continue dealing with a new regulatory climate, resulting in some new winners and a few familiar losers. Short-form video will make gains with commerce, and the metaverse will rear its head.

Every national market in the world will finish this year with more ad spending than in 2020. In most categories, worldwide growth records will be shattered. But 2021 was a very unusual year, following a very unusual 2020.

China continues to lead the world in all things ecommerce, including innovation. Social commerce livestreaming is just one of many new stories for 2021 and beyond.

Though virtually unknown outside of China, a new crop of local direct-to-consumer brands are making a name for themselves at home—and even outperforming some of the major foreign players.

China is often seen as the wild west of privacy protection, where unscrupulous companies collect and trade personal data as regulators and consumers stand idly by. The Chinese government has been trying to change that, most recently by drafting a privacy law akin to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While the implications for businesses are still murky, it’s clear that China is determined to tackle this issue its own way, at its own pace.

“Women hold up half the sky,” former Chinese leader Mao Zedong famously said. More than fifty years on, women in China are doing so online, driving digital trends and fast becoming a cohort that marketers ignore at their peril.

In 2020, China was the only major economy to produce economic growth. It’s not surprising, then, that it was also the only major national market to see an increase in total media ad spending. Girded by this economic strength, China’s digital ad market hardly missed a beat.

The rest of the world is waking up to the potential of shoppable livestreams, but it’s old news to China’s short-form video players and ecommerce platforms. Short-video leaders Douyin (TikTok’s sister app) and Kuaishou (known outside of China as Kwai) have been expanding their social commerce operations, not just to sell products, but to provide services and other forms of content as well.