中国境内：解决非为国际品牌打造的媒体市场——执行简报报告

An Executive Briefing Report Authors: Stewart LiManaging Director,Ebiquity China Bob DuSenior Director of Insights,Ebiquity China Kyle HongSenior Client Partner,Ebiquity China This briefing makes one central argument:China’s media market is structurally different Contents Why this report exists China does not operate by the rules you think it does While local brands grow, international advertisersare standing still 13% of your China media investment is lost everyyear. Here is how. China’s KOL market is the world’s largest and theleast governed The advisor you choose determines whether theproblem gets solved Why this report exists Every major internationaladvertiser has a Chinaproblem. But most are China is the world’s second-largestadvertising market. It is growing. Theplatforms are known. The agencyrelationships are in place. And yet, year This briefing makes one central argument:China’s media market is structurally differentfrom every other major market, and theframeworks most international advertisersare using to govern it were built for markets Ebiquity has operated in China for 18 years.Our data pool covers €18 billion in real mediaplacement records across eight proprietarydatabases, built entirely from independentaudit work and free from commercial The five articles that follow workthrough this argument from the ground up.They start with the structural realities thatmake China ungovernable by conventional They close with the question that followsfrom everything before it: what genuineindependent expertise in this marketactually looks like, and how to verify it EXECUTIVE BRIEFING China does notoperate by the rules China’s media market isthe world’s second largest The governance tools most international advertisers use,built for open, biddable Western markets, do not function ina system defined by walled ecosystems, negotiated pricing,and a structural broker layer that exists specifically toprevent external verification. The risk is not theoretical: WFAdata shows that by 2025, 50% of international advertisers China is the world’s second largest advertising market.It is also the least transparent among the top 20. Mostinternational advertisers hold both of those factssimultaneously without fully reckoning with what they mean of international advertisers had noindependent means of verifying whattheir China agency was reporting Digital dominance does not mean The insertion order gap In the United States, 91% of digital media is bought programmatically. The United Kingdomstands at 96%. France at 95%. Germany at 92%. Globally, 24.5% of digital media is transacted China’s digital adspend share stands at 86.1%,higher than any other major market globally.North America is at 82%. Western Europe is at This is the deliberate structure of a system in which pricing is negotiated in China, notauctioned. China’s agency groups aggregate the total spend of all their clients to secure group-level deals directly with platforms. Individual advertisers cannot independently verify what Eight internet giants, including Alibaba,ByteDance, Tencent, and Baidu, control 85% ofall digital adspend across thousands of apps.No international platform operates in thisecosystem. That concentration does not producethe transparency advertisers in the West would The broker layer Approximately 30% of media investment byinternational agencies in China flows throughintermediaries and brokers. More than Why the frameworks you are usingwere not built for this market Intermediaries are structural to the system,not accidental or a by-product. AgencyVolume Bonuses (AVB) and Agency VolumeRebates (AVR) are negotiated, distributed,and in many cases concealed through thislayer. The opaque revenue it generates A Western media contract, KPI framework,or audit process carries assumptions aboutthe buying environment it was designed for. In Rebate disclosure clauses written in Europehave no equivalent enforcement mechanismin a Shanghai trading relationship. Pre-flightevaluation tools assume a biddable market.Brand safety and viewability monitoring rely WFA surveys from 2014 to 2025 showa consistent and worsening picture. In2014, China ranked last for transparencyamong the top 20 markets. By 2025, 58% Six questions that should have clear answers Understanding the structural differences is the starting point. The sixquestions below are not rhetorical. Any competent governance function 1.Do you know how much ofyour China media budget flowsthrough third-party brokers, 2.Does your agency contractexplicitly restrict booking 3.Can you independently verifywhat your agency reports on 5.When did you lastbenchmark your Chinaagency fees and media 4.Do you know which platformsyour agency is prioritising, 6.Do you have audit rightsin your current China agency If any of these questions cannot be answered with confidence, the exposure isreal. The response is not to apply existing governance tools more vigorously. Itis to under