Here is my position after thirteen years of selling to Chinese consumers: in China, a brand without video is invisible. Not weaker. Not less engaging. Invisible. Chinese consumers now spend more time watching video than doing anything else on their phones, and the platforms have rebuilt search, e-commerce and even customer service around it. If your China presence is still text and product photos, you are competing for attention in a format most of your buyers have stopped reading.
Olivier Verot is the founder of Gentlemen Marketing Agency (GMA), based in Shanghai since 2012. His team has produced and distributed video campaigns on Douyin, WeChat Channels and Bilibili for more than a hundred international brands.
The numbers make the argument for me
When I first published this article in 2014, the big prediction was that 69 percent of consumer internet traffic would be video by 2017. That number felt bold at the time. It now looks quaint.
According to Xinhua, citing the China Internet Audiovisual Development Report, online video and audio services reached 1.099 billion users in China in 2026. Short video alone counts over 1.04 billion users, a 93.8 percent penetration rate among Chinese internet users, and the average user spends around 156 minutes per day on it. That is two and a half hours, every day, on Douyin, Kuaishou and their cousins.
QuestMobile’s Q1 2026 mobile internet report confirms the shift from another angle: video now absorbs over 40 percent of all time spent on mobile internet in China, the largest share of any category. Douyin and Kuaishou lead, and micro-drama apps like Hongguo have pushed into the top four, with the micro-drama audience alone reaching 718 million monthly users by early 2026.
One more number, because it matters for budgets. Attention has split into three camps: Douyin for reach and impulse purchase, Kuaishou for lower-tier cities and community trust, and WeChat Channels (Shipinhao) for the older, wealthier audience already inside the WeChat social graph. Channels e-commerce GMV has multiplied several times over since 2023, and Tencent still describes its monetization as mid-stage. Translation: the cheap traffic there has not run out yet.
What video still does better than anything else
The fundamentals I wrote about in 2014 have not changed. Video explains the use, the benefits and the value of a product better than text and images can. It carries more information per second, and it asks less effort from the viewer. What has changed is that these advantages are no longer optional extras. They are the entry ticket.
It creates atmosphere
Video remains the best way to build a mood around a brand. Motion plus the right sound is an emotional medium, and emotion is what puts a buyer in the state of mind to spend. This old Ermenegildo Zegna short film is still one of my favorite examples.
The film shows a business mind who is always stylish, always composed, whatever the circumstances, in a mine or on a plane. He plays with kids, he decides to give a world-changing discovery away. It sends an emotional message that businessmen, a core Zegna audience, can project themselves into. A decade later, brands run the same play in 15-second vertical cuts on Douyin instead of 3-minute films. The craft changed. The mechanism did not.
It teaches, and teaching builds loyalty
Tutorial content is still the strongest video format in China, especially for cosmetics. Many young consumers learn makeup techniques directly from brand and KOC videos. If they learned with your products, they stay with your products. And a customer who understands how to use what she bought is far less likely to return it. Return rates are a silent killer on Chinese platforms, so this point alone can justify a video budget.
It gets shared, and shares carry trust
Viewers share video more willingly than any other product content. The old research figure was 41 percent more likely, and everything we see in campaign data since then points the same direction. A shared video also arrives with an implicit endorsement from the person who shared it. In China, where peer trust beats brand claims by a wide margin, that endorsement is worth more than the media spend behind the video.
Video content is built to travel across networks. Publish natively on each platform, adapt the format, and make sharing effortless. One production shoot should feed Douyin, Channels, Xiaohongshu and your Tmall page. Check our Douyin statistics for 2026 before you decide where the first cut goes.
Video is now part of the shelf
In 2014 I wrote that shoppers are far more likely to buy if they can watch a product video, and that “purchase while watching” was a new strategy. In 2026, it is simply how Chinese e-commerce works. Livestream commerce is a standard channel. Tmall and JD product pages open with video, not photos. Taobao has pushed short video into its search results, a shift CBNData documented as the search bar itself going short-video. Merchant data from the Taobao side shows the pattern: one furniture seller’s “sofa sitting test” clip converted about 40 percent better than the image-only version of the same listing.
Alibaba saw this coming early. Back in 2014 the group bought a 16.5 percent stake in Youku to accelerate its video strategy. Today the fight has moved on: Douyin built a full e-commerce operation on top of its video feed, and it is pulling merchants away from the traditional shelf. We analyzed that shift in why brands are leaving Tmall for Douyin. The short version: on Douyin, the video is the store.
Practical consequence for your team. Every product launch needs three video assets minimum: a 15 to 30 second vertical demo for the product page, a set of short feed clips for Douyin or Channels, and cut-down highlights from any livestream you run. Livestream replays and clips keep selling for weeks after the stream ends. Most brands throw that material away. Do not.
AI video and virtual hosts, the 2026 wrinkle
The newest shift is production cost collapsing. AI-generated video and digital human hosts have moved from gimmick to standard tooling. A virtual host livestream room runs at roughly one tenth the monthly cost of a human team, and it streams at 3 a.m. when your night-owl buyers are scrolling. Conversion per hour is lower than a good human host, no argument there. But the math of 24-hour coverage across several rooms often wins for catalog products.
Two warnings from our own client work. First, compliance: Douyin requires virtual hosts to be driven by a real person in real time, and the rules keep tightening. Read our guide to Douyin’s AI digital human livestream rules before you switch anything on. Second, localization: AI voices with off Mandarin intonation, or missing hard-coded subtitles, get punished by the algorithm and mocked in comments. Chinese viewers watch with subtitles on. Always burn them in, always have a native speaker sign off on the script.
A case from our files
A European kitchenware brand came to us in 2025 with a solid Tmall store and flat sales. Good products, professional photos, zero video. Their conversion rate sat below the category average and their return rate was above it. Buyers could not tell from photos how the cookware behaved on a Chinese gas burner, so they guessed, and wrong guesses came back as returns.
We produced one shoot in Shanghai: a 25-second demo for each hero product page, showing real cooking on a real wok burner, plus twelve vertical clips for Douyin with a home chef KOC. Total production budget under 200,000 RMB. Three months later, product page conversion was up 19 percent, returns were down by roughly a quarter, and the Douyin clips fed retargeting audiences that lowered their paid traffic cost per order. The mechanism is not magic. The video answered the questions buyers were asking before purchase, so more of them bought, and the right ones bought.
Where to start
Start from the money and work backwards. Fix your product page videos first, because that traffic already has intent. Then build a native short-video presence on the one platform where your audience actually is, not on all of them at once. Then test livestreaming, first with an agency-run room, later with your own. If you are an early-stage company preparing your China entry, the priorities are different: read our companion article on why a start-up in China needs a presentation video, which covers that specific case.
GMA produces, localizes and distributes video for international brands in China, from Douyin campaigns and Channels livestreams to product page video for Tmall and JD. We work with our own studio and KOC network in Shanghai, so you test formats without hiring a local team. Tell us your product and your target, and we will send back a video plan with budgets: contact us here.
FAQ
How much does video marketing in China cost?
Less than most brands expect. A batch of KOC-style vertical clips starts around 3,000 to 8,000 RMB per video. A proper brand film in a studio runs 100,000 RMB and up. Product page demo videos sit in between. The real budget question is distribution: organic reach on Douyin is earned by watch time, so plan paid boosting for the clips that show early traction rather than spreading budget evenly.
Which platform should a foreign brand start with?
It depends on who buys from you. Douyin gives the biggest reach and the strongest impulse-purchase machine. WeChat Channels reaches older, higher-income users and plugs into your WeChat private traffic. Xiaohongshu suits beauty, fashion and lifestyle discovery. Bilibili works for younger, geekier audiences that want depth. Most of our clients start with Douyin plus product page video, then add a second platform once the content engine runs.
Can we just reuse our TikTok or YouTube videos?
You can reuse footage, not finished videos. Pacing expectations differ, the first two seconds decide everything, and references that work in Europe often fall flat. At minimum you need burned-in simplified Chinese subtitles, a re-cut for vertical format, and a hook rebuilt for the platform. A native review of the script is non-negotiable. Machine-translated subtitles are the fastest way to look careless in front of a Chinese audience.
Do AI-generated videos and virtual hosts hurt a brand’s image?
Not if you use them where they belong. Chinese consumers accept digital hosts for late-night catalog livestreams and product explainers. They reject them when a brand fakes authenticity, for example an AI presenter posing as a real founder. Keep humans on your hero content and brand storytelling, use AI for volume and coverage, and respect platform disclosure rules. Douyin already requires real-time human driving for virtual hosts.
