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 help merchants rapidly generate product copy, engaging visuals, and compelling videos 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 adoption of 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. While useful, these tools only scratch the surface. It’s often said that 80% of truly valuable customer insight is buried in unstructured data – social posts, feedback forms, creator content, and chat logs that were historically too messy or 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 a dedicated analytics team. Instead of waiting weeks for insights, marketers can now 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 feedback analysis 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 property with GenAI, the HKMA was able to create a sentiment index that became the leading 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 metric historically difficult to measure accurately. For marketers, this means creating refined indexes that capture customer sentiment for brands, products and 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 influences perception and engagement, enriching strategic decision-making across the purchase funnel.

This application of GenAI powered customer analytics is also something that we have done here at Ekimetrics. For instance, we recently partnered with a major retailer to analyze open-ended customer feedback across seven Asian markets. Using GenAI, the brand processed comments in seven languages in under four weeks. The results helped local teams uncover customer pain points, tailor messaging to market nuances, and adjust product positioning—all of which contributed to an 8% increase in NPS.

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

GenAI Powers a New Era of Real Time Marketing Insights and Analytics

Marketers also struggle with analyzing data—many retail teams operate with lean or underdeveloped analytics functions, which can barely keep up with the 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 a result, timely, efficient analysis becomes nearly impossible, leaving valuable insights hidden in plain sight.

Thanks to GenAI, this technology has 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, datadriven decisions.⁴ As capabilities like these start feeding into more sophisticated statistical models such as MMM, marketers gain the power to more accurately evaluate media impact 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 tested this approach with a regional beauty player by integrating their marketing performance data into a chatbot. This allowed both marketers and senior management to quickly test hypotheses, gain rapid insights, and significantly improve their efficiency, freeing them to focus on more strategic, valueadded marketing tasks.

Kickstarting Success: A Practical Playbook for Marketers in Hong Kong and Mainland China

Hong Kong and Mainland China stands to benefit immensely from GenAI – the localized infrastructure and established culture around GenAI make it a perfect launchpad for the many brands who are keen to adopt the emerging technology.

If you are keen to start to turn GenAI into your measurement ally, here are some guides we would recommend:

Start small: Choose a manageable use case—such as analyzing campaign feedback or reviewing influencer content across 1 or 2 markets. Begin with simple, accessible tools to focus on what truly matters: proving business value and understanding what GenAI can do. There’s no need to dive into complex setups or technical deep-dives at the start – keeping it light helps you stay focused on outcomes, not execution.
Mind your data: Garbage-in, Garbage-out still applies. Select a use case where the data quality is strong and remember that most GenAI tools handle text better than tabular formats to start with. Bring in a technical expert if needed to ensure clean inputs and tuned outputs.
Prioritize data privacy: Understand how and where your data is processed. Some GenAI tools retain user inputs, while others don’t. Read the terms and conditions, and when possible, consult specialists familiar with secure data handling.
Build a prompt library: Create a set of reusable prompts to answer common strategic questions. Review and refine them regularly to keep pace with business needs.
Streamline Your Data or Seek Assistance: Crafting your own prompts can be an exciting and exploratory process, but it can also be time-consuming. Fortunately, various AI enabled measurement tools like Ekimetrics’ One Vision are available to help you consolidate diverse data sources, forecast outcomes, and simulate results. These tools leverage GenAI features to analyze data effectively. Discover solutions specifically designed to meet your marketing needs and accelerate your measurement journey.

The Future of Marketing Measurement with GenAI

Generative AI is more than just a creative tool. It can be your new measurement partner, capable of delivering insights at scale, with nuance, and in context.

In a region with a growing culture of technological advancement and practical adaptation, GenAI gives Chinese marketers a real opportunity to further leverage GenAI to develop proactive, insight-driven media strategies, given that work is done in ensuring that the data maturity is there and with good quality data.

The future of measurement isn’t just automated—it’s conversational, contextual, and collaborative.

Author:

Zoe Cheng, Commercial Director, Ekimetrics APAC, IAB Hong Kong Measurement Committee Member

Koby Wong, Senior Consultant, Ekimetrics APAC

Celine Wong, Head of ASEAN, Ekimetrics APAC

Olivier Kuziner, Managing Partner, Ekimetrics APAC

Article launched on 20/11/2025

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