The Impact of AI on the Advertising Process: The Chinese Experience

Knowing that the demand for advertising in a growing e-commerce market cannot be sufficiently addressed in a traditional advertising operation model, advertisers and e-commerce platforms apply artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in advertising to improve efficiency and meet the market demand. From observations in the Chinese advertising market over the past five years, the authors gain insight into how AI technologies are applied in the advertising process and propose that the advertising process powered by AI technologies is composed of four steps: consumer insight discovery, ad creation, media planning and buying, and ad impact evaluation. This new advertising process, which is supported by a data-based platform with algorithms at its core, is tool based, synchronized, and highly efficient. AI has reorganized and upgraded the traditional advertising process and improved advertising efficiency; however, the new process is still born out of the traditional process and is not yet a reengineered one.