Ad Campaigns
UC Ads under Alibaba Group initiates a revolution of content marketing
New Delhi, September 27, 2018: On September 28, Morden Chen, General Manager of Alibaba UC Ads, will reveal their short video ads platform at The MMA Forum being held at Taj Santa Cruz in Mumbai. This is an initiative by Alibaba UC Ads to start the revolution of short video ads in India and strive to become the largest one-stop content marketing platform. It is reported that UC Ads has maintained long-term co-operations with Amazon, Flipkart, PayTM Mall, Tokopedia, Lazada and other top e-commerce platforms in India and Indonesia. Other important partners include mobile phone brands, operators and FMCG brands, etc.
UC Ads will launch a revolution of short video ads in the Indian market.
"We've noticed that people in India were used to watching TV together with their families while more and more young people prefer to be with their phones and browse what they like, no longer confined to TV programs," Morden said. “With the popularity of mobile devices and declining mobile internet service charges, people are more accustomed to diverse contents on their mobile phones and reading is becoming fragmented. Short video features short time and can be viewed on the move, which is getting more and more popular. Many short video platforms have emerged against this backdrop, with information consumption upgrading from pure image-text to image-text + video.”
He continued, “People's attention span is reducing. According to a survey by Microsoft in 2015, after a habit of using mobile devices is developed, people's attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds which is shorter than that of a goldfish. This calls for the digital content on mobile devices to be more refined with more selling points.”
For brands, the short video ads not only cater to the consumers’ new habit of favoring fragmented contents on the mobile phone over long videos but also coincide with the memory pattern of users in the mobile phone era. The short video ads are well received by mature markets, however, their potentials have been underestimated by brand marketers in India where mobile device ownership has skyrocketed. Tomorrow at the MMA Forum, Morden Chen will introduce the practices of marketers in mature markets. They replace the strategy of brand videos with mobile first strategies and determine the presentation of video ads based on the demand of mobile clients to make ads more suitable for the application scenarios of mobile devices. UC Ads offers a variety of short video ads solutions, including the pioneering splash video, in-feeds video and in-article video and has facilitated brand marketers to implement the mobile first strategy for short video marketing, rendering more opportunities to effectively reach users.
The first one-stop content marketing platform
With hard-sell advertising flooding the marketplace, brands need new ways to reach consumers. A brand with a good reputation is more likely to be chosen by consumers, overshadowing its counterparts. The value of internet celebrity marketing has been verified as internet celebrities have stable followers and are able to generate much more data consumption. The products promoted under the celebrity halo are easily accepted by followers and quickly converted into orders. Internet celebrities can spark discussions in the community, creating a ripple effect of getting the consumers’ attention to a brand.
However, existing platforms providing buzz marketing solutions with limited resources either focus on content creation of We-Media or targeted content releases. Advertisers need to reach We-Media on platform A to complete content creation, and then search for the appropriate media depending on the attributes of TA and media to issue ads. The problem is that content and platform do not match during the process.
By directly connecting We-Media resources with technology platform of UC, UC Ads establishes a smart integrated content marketing lab providing one-stop buzz marketing solutions. In India and Indonesia, UC Influencer Pool is home to more than 100,000 We-Media from a dozen fields such as fashion, 3C, automobile and sports, etc., capable of creating buzz contents for brands. Through operating its information flow, UC understands the users’ interest so that the brand content matches with the most relevant users according to their interests on UC platform and push the relevant buzz created by the internet celebrities. UC has completed the whole process from organizing We-Media to content creation, crowd matching and targeted content releases, avoiding the resource mismatch of each link.
The competition for users in the Indian market gradually expands from the first-tier cities to the second, third and fourth tier cities and rural areas. All applications and brands are trying to attract the increasing number of emerging class in these places as the newly-arisen users start to have the internet access. UC Ads resources are from UC browser, UC News and 9Apps with the information flow of browser reaching 130 million monthly active users in first-tier to second, third and fourth tier cities in India. This is conducive to the country’s consumption upgrading.
NATIONAL: Amazon Ads has laid out a sharply tech-led vision for the advertising industry in 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence, streaming TV and creator partnerships will combine to turn brand building into a more precise, performance-driven business.
At the heart of the shift, the company says, is the fusion of AI with Amazon’s vast trove of shopping, browsing and streaming signals, allowing advertisers to move beyond blunt reach metrics to campaigns designed around real customer behaviour.
“The future of advertising is not about reaching more people, but the right people with messages that resonate,” said Amazon Ads India head and vice president Girish Prabhu. “By combining AI with deep customer insights, we help brands move from broadcasting campaigns to having meaningful conversations wherever audiences spend their time.”
One of the biggest changes, according to Amazon Ads, will be the collapse of the wall between media planning and creative development. Retail media, powered by first-party data, is increasingly shaping everything from brand discovery to final purchase, pushing marketers to design campaigns around audience insight rather than internal instinct.
AI is also moving from a support tool to a creative engine. Agentic AI, which automates and accelerates production, is expected to make high-quality creative accessible even to small businesses, compressing weeks of work into hours and giving challengers the ability to compete with larger brands on speed and scale.
Behind the scenes, AI-driven analytics will take on a bigger role in campaign optimisation, identifying patterns, spotting opportunities and recommending actions that would previously have required teams of analysts.
Streaming TV is another big battleground. With India’s video streaming audience now above 600 million and connected TV users at 129.2 million in 2025, advertisers are set to treat streaming not just as a branding channel but as a performance engine, measured increasingly by sales, sign-ups and bookings rather than just reach.
Finally, Amazon Ads sees creators and contextual advertising reshaping how brands tell stories. Creators will act less like influencers and more like long-term partners, while scene-aware ads on streaming platforms will allow brands to insert hyper-relevant offers into the flow of what viewers are watching.
Taken together, Amazon Ads argues, these shifts mark a move towards advertising that is both more human and more measurable, where AI handles the complexity, and creativity does the persuading.
