Mobile And Social Playing Key Roles In Chinese Advertising Success

China’s digital population continues to grow. There are 854 million Chinese netizens. It’s media and marketing landscape is overwhelmingly digital. More than 70% of all ad spend is digital and, 80% of all digital advertising is targeted at mobile audiences.

For brands, effective planning links together social media, content and video branding – with ecommerce and omnichannel retail/sales opportunities.

Despite a slowdown in China during 2019/20, the market size and momentum warrant strong, long-term strategies from brands.

China’s Internet Population Is Still Growing

While the total number of netizens in China continues to grow at around 6% year-on-year, mobile growth is slowing.

Mobile growth seems to be reaching a saturation point. According to the QuestMobile report, mobile internet user growth fell below 1 percent for the first time in 2019 (0.7% increase).

Digital Ad Spend Continues Growth

China is overwhelmingly biased toward digital ad spending. Depending on the source and structure of calculations, digital represents 60-70% of all advertising spend in China, as of 2019-2020.

And, over 80% of all digital advertising spend is mobile versus only a <20% share for desktop spending. This ratio is projected to grow to 87:13 in favor of mobile by 2023, according to eMarketer

Mobile Media & Entertainment

Social networking continues to dominate overall user activity on mobile in China. However, social networking has lost ground to video in the past two years. Social networking went from 60% of all time on mobile in 2016, to 47% in 2018.

Video’s share of time grew from 13% in 2016, to 22% in 2018. Short video apps - namely Douyin -account for this big swing in attention to video.

News also enjoyed an increase in time spent by users. In this case, the big winner was Toutiao and similar news streams who have done a good job of customizing and socializing news to match individual interests and growing interest-group.

Brand Audiences Connect Via Social

Globally, the effectiveness of social media for overall digital ROI has been hard to quantify. While the relationship between search and purchase is much more direct, social has found its role in the path-to purchase considerably harder to define.

In China, where social and ecommerce are much more tightly connected, the importance of social is clearer. Data from iConsumer and McKinsey show that the role and effectiveness of social is increasing in China.