The GenAI Advantage: Revolutionizing Marketing Measurement in Hong Kong and Mainland China

Generative AI (GenAI) is not new—Forrester reports that 85% of APAC marketing decision-makers already use GenAI, primarily for content creation. Taobao in China, for instance, rolled out a suite of GenAI tools to helpmerchants rapidly generate product copy, engaging visuals, and compellingvideos for its high-stakes Double 11 shopping festival.[1]

But GenAI’s potential goes far beyond the creative. Its unique ability to interpret natural language and translate everyday questions into technical analyses addresses one of marketers’ biggest hurdles: becoming genuinely data-driven. By enabling conversational access to data, GenAI democratizes deep insight discovery from measuring customer sentiment to optimizing campaign impact. This opens the door for a new era of measurement and in marketing mix modeling, one that’s faster, more adaptive, and truly accessible. It empowers marketers to iterate, experiment, and optimize across channels, redefining how ROI and attribution are measured in a dynamic digital landscape.

‍

The GenAI Opportunity:Accelerating Growth and Strategy in Greater China

The potential of GenAI is amplified in Hong Kong and Mainland China, where the region's newly developed regulations and infrastructure around AI technology positions it as a dynamic hub for GenAI-led transformation that defines the future of marketing measurement.

• Localized Infrastructure: A common, big challenge with the adoption of GenAI in other APAC or non-English speaking markets is the complexity behind the many different languages and cultures that need to be absorbed and interpreted under a single LLM model. In contrast, China’s GenAI landscape benefits from locally developed models like ERNIE, Qwen, and DeepSeek, each purpose-built to navigate the nuances of the Chinese language and market dynamics. This localized infrastructure gives China a unique edge in tracking sentiment and measuring campaign impact with greater precision and efficiency through readily accessible resources.
• Established culture around leveraging AI: Government-led AI initiatives in Hong Kong and Mainland China have paved the way for the development of highly specialized GenAI tools for marketing. One standout example is ERNIE (文小言) by Baidu, which helps marketers enhance localization, optimize keyword strategies, and generate culturally relevant content for Chinese audiences. The strong cultural foundation around GenAI has also accelerated its adoption across marketing teams, particularly in terms of SEO and SEM[2].

Yet despite these advantages in the Hong Kong and Chinese market, the current adoptionof GenAI in the region is still mostly centered around content generation, with its potential in marketing measurement remaining mostly untapped. This begs the question: how can marketers in Hong Kong and Mainland China use GenAI to better measure and optimize media performance?

‍

Revolutionizing Marketing Measurement in Greater China

For years, marketers have leaned on structured metrics like clicks,impressions, and brand tracking surveys to understand performance. Whileuseful, these tools only scratch the surface. It’s often said that 80% of trulyvaluable customer insight is buried in unstructured data – social posts,feedback forms, creator content, and chat logs that were historically too messyor too multilingual to process at scale.

That’s where GenAI comes in. It turns unstructured, multilingual,real-time customer data into something marketers can act on—without needing adedicated analytics team. Instead of waiting weeks for insights, marketers cannow explore these questions in their daily workflow:

• “What are customers feeling?” → GenAI can summarize the emotional tone across reviews and comments, identifying shifts in sentiment by campaign, market, or audience segment.
• “Which messages are landing—or not?” → It can analyze brand voice consistency and consumer response across creators, geographies, and formats.
• “Are we improving?” → It can track changes over time in user feedback and identifies recurring issues or moments of delight that can inform strategy.

An example of how GenAI is being utilized for at scale customer feedbackanalysis is the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), which developed an in-house GenAI tool to measure buyer sentiment in the China housing market.Through scraping over 450,000 microblogs and 44,000 videos related to propertywith GenAI, the HKMA was able to create a sentiment index that became theleading indicator for property sales in China[3].While not strictly a marketing example, this highlights GenAI’s potential in developing high-resolution sentiment metrics within China and Hong Kong, a metrichistorically difficult to measure accurately.

For marketers, this meanscreating refined indexes that capture customer sentiment for brands, productsand advertisements at scale in more refined granularities. The utilization of this new GenAI powered metric in more advanced analytical models such as MMM can also allow them to evolve beyond sales attribution and assess how media influencesperception and engagement, enriching strategic decision-making across the purchase funnel.

This application of GenAI powered customer analytics is also somethingthat we have done here at Ekimetrics. For instance, we recently partnered witha major retailer to analyze open-ended customer feedback across seven Asianmarkets. Using GenAI, the brand processed comments in seven languages in underfour weeks. The results helped local teams uncover customer pain points, tailormessaging to market nuances, and adjust product positioning—all of whichcontributed to an 8% increase in NPS.

By blending quantitative data with qualitative insights, GenAI helpsmarketers spot performance trends more clearly, refine their strategies withgreater accuracy, and maintain brand consistency across multiple markets. Itcan even identify potential issues before they escalate into bigger problems. Simplyput, GenAI doesn't just allow marketers to measure more—it empowers them tomeasure what genuinely matters for their brand’s long-term health and growth.

‍

GenAI Powers a New Era of Real TimeMarketing Insights and Analytics

Marketers also struggle with analyzing data—many retail teams operatewith lean or underdeveloped analytics functions, which can barely keep up withthe rapid pace of digital marketing. Adding to this challenge is the region’s large size, where marketers have to often juggle between multiple shopping platforms, apps, and data sources that may have their own unique digital ecosystems. As aresult, timely, efficient analysis becomes nearly impossible, leaving valuableinsights hidden in plain sight.

Thanks to GenAI, this technologyhas fundamentally changed and democratized the future of measurement by having it as an always-on insights analyst. What previously required data analysts a few hours to days of work can now be boiled down to quick, simple questions from marketers like "What drove brand lift in Shanghai last quarter?" or"How did our latest campaign perform on JD, Tmall and PingDuoDuo last month?".  Combined with GenAI’s capability to process large amounts of external information, marketers can now receive clear, context-rich answers in less than an hour.

This capability is something that has already been explored in certain ecommerce platforms in China. Recently, Taobao and Tmall have leveraged Alibaba’s Qwen GenAI model to build an always on business analyst that is embedded in its platform for online marketers. By integrating an AI-powered market insights tool, marketers are now able to analyze consumer demand and competitor activity in real time, enabling dynamic, data-driven decisions[4].As capabilities like these start feeding into more sophisticated statisticalmodels such as MMM, marketers gain the power to more accurately evaluate mediaimpact and adjust strategies instantly. In fast-moving digital environments, GenAI is redefining how performance is tracked, interpreted, and optimized, making MMM more real-time, granular, and actionable.

At Ekimetrics, we recently testedthis approach with a regional beauty player by integrating their marketing performance data into a chatbot. This allowed both marketers and seniormanagement to quickly test hypotheses, gain rapid insights, and significantlyimprove their efficiency, freeing them to focus on more strategic, value-addedmarketing tasks.

‍

[1] (https://www.imd.org/ibyimd/magazine/how-ai-gives-taobaos-one-billion-customers-the-personal-touch/)

[2] https://www.chinafy.com/blog/baidu-ai-using-ernie-bot-to-support-a-china-marketing-strategy#practical-use-cases-for-marketers

[3] https://www.hkma.gov.hk/media/eng/publication-and-research/research/research-memorandums/2025/RM05-2025.pdf.pdf

[4] https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/taobao-and-tmall-upgrades-consumer-shopping-experience-and-merchant-support-through-ai_601285