AI Marketing Reached in China ? How Should Brands Apply it?

AI marketing in China is undergoing a significant transformation. As generative artificial intelligence technology in China enters a mature application stage, a profound paradigm shift is occurring in the marketing field. We can see that artificial intelligence has transformed from an auxiliary tool into a core engine driving creative production; it is no longer merely a technical component for generating images and optimizing copy, but has become a "content ontology" capable of constructing complete narratives and evoking emotional resonance with users. This technological evolution signifies a fundamental restructuring of marketing logic.

Marketing practices in 2025 clearly demonstrate this shift. Brands no longer view artificial intelligence as an experimental promotional tool, but rather deeply integrate it into the core of their marketing strategies.

Overview of AI Use in Chinese Creative Fields

AIGC, as a new type of content production method, has fully penetrated the content production industry, and its market potential is evident. By 2025, it had reached a market size of 25.7 billion yuan.

The AIGC industry ecosystem has formed a clear three-layer architecture:

The upstream layer provides technical support based on the underlying technology .

The midstream is the vertical application layer, focusing on specific industries and functional scenarios .

Downstream is the terminal application layer, which directly faces C-end users.

In 2025, the AIGC industry continued its explosive growth, achieving significant breakthroughs in both core technologies and practical applications. At the application level, AIGC achieved widespread penetration in personal life and business operations. AIGC showed outstanding potential in enterprise marketing, accelerating the growth of advertising and marketing businesses, and is projected to reach a market size of tens of millions by 2030.

On the marketing side, AIGC has transcended its role as a mere technical aid, achieving a fundamental shift from "tool empowerment" to "value co-creation," and even making it the main body of the marketing narrative.

53.1% of advertisers are already using AIGC technology in their creative content.

Nearly 20% of advertisers rely on AI for more than half of the video creation process.

2025 China AI Marketing Case Studies

By-Health AI brand film: "Dare to Explore the Extremes"

Faced with declining consumer demand for dietary supplements and fierce brand competition, By-Health has chosen to use Antarctic scientific expeditions as a strategic IP to strengthen its brand image of "scientific nutrition" and restore its market influence.

In December 2025, By-Health released its 30th anniversary brand film. Due to the high cost and difficulty of filming on location at an ice lake, the entire brand film was produced using AI, fully leveraging AI's advantages in grand narratives, science fiction scene presentation, and historical scene recreation. At the same time, the advertisement successfully solved the technical challenges of AI character generation, generating natural and realistic character images with natural expressions and movements through extensive optimization of prompts.

Users have widely praised the film's stunning visual effects and high production quality. The realism of the AI-generated visuals (i.e., the degree to which the "AI feel" is minimized) has become a key criterion for evaluating the work's quality. Users also generally recognize the significant advantages of AIGC technology in reducing production costs and improving production efficiency.

The Palace Museum: "A Night of Reunion for Palace Museum Treasures"

During the Mid-Autumn Festival in 2025, the Palace Museum's AIGC short film, a collaboration with Volcano Engine, garnered widespread attention. Using AI technology, the film brought over 20 cultural relics to life, collectively presenting the theme of reunion. This marked China's first 4K cinematic-quality animated feature film about cultural relics, successfully overcoming the technical bottlenecks of traditional AI videos, such as inconsistent camera movements and distorted subject images, representing a significant milestone in the development of AIGC film and television in China. Furthermore, on the centenary of the Palace Museum's founding, it broke down the formality of traditional cultural relic narratives through a "technology + creativity" model, promoting the digital revitalization and utilization of 100,000 items in its "Digital Cultural Relics Database."

Mixue Ice Cream x Keling

2025 , Mixue Ice Cream and Kuaishou's Keling launched a joint collaboration, using their core IPs as a link to build a comprehensive marketing system covering multiple scenarios and linking multiple businesses. After the campaign was launched, it effectively increased user engagement, and related topics all made it onto Kuaishou's trending list, while also gaining tens of millions of views on the Kuaishou platform.