China’s Spring Festival Gala, long a showcase for household brands and spirits, is being remade as a battleground for AI firms and robot makers. ByteDance’s consumer AI, Doubao, announced it will appear on the 2026 Gala and is offering more than 100,000 tech prizes and up to RMB 8,888 in cash on Lunar New Year’s Eve as part of a two‑stage promotional push aimed at converting national television reach into active users.
The prize pool is strikingly tech‑heavy: smart watches, appliances and what the company calls “intelligent” devices that run Doubao’s large model, from humanoid and dog robots to 3D printers and even usage rights for electric cars. Other internet platforms — Kuaishou, Bilibili and Xiaohongshu among them — and several embodied‑AI firms including Yushu Technology, Galaxy General, Magic Atom and Songyan Power have also been named Gala partners. Robot choreography and demonstrations, rather than liquor jingles, are set to be one of the evening’s visual highlights.
That surge of tech sponsorship coincides with a marked retreat by white‑spirit makers. Once the Gala’s dominant category, baijiu sponsors have been pared back to four confirmed brands for 2026, down from nine at the 2024 peak and six in 2025. The change is more than cosmetic: it signals shrinking marketing budgets and a sector in adjustment as consumption patterns evolve.
The gala’s commercial history helps explain why this matters. The telecast has long doubled as a national advertising stage and an economic barometer: wristwatches and bicycles in earlier decades, home appliances in the 1990s, and app‑driven campaigns in the 2010s. The 2015 WeChat red‑envelope phenomenon is the best remembered example of a single Gala appearance reshaping an entire consumer market and user habits — a template that technology platforms are trying to replicate in the AI era.
This year’s AI scramble is not just about budgeted ad spots. ByteDance’s Doubao is using the Gala to push large‑model features and to accelerate habit formation across China’s huge base of mobile users. Rival assistants such as Alibaba’s Qianwen and Tencent’s Yuanbao are running aggressive promotional programs of their own — discount‑heavy invites, in‑app freebies and social features designed to seed daily usage — but none has yet achieved a clear technological edge in core capabilities.
Embodied AI players are betting that a single Gala moment can achieve what years of trade shows and demos have struggled to: rapid brand recognition and investor attention. Four robotics companies have paid reportedly around RMB 100 million each for Gala partnerships, a sum that is a material fraction of established firms’ annual R&D spend. The gamble follows the breakout exposure Yushu Technology gained from a 2025 Gala segment, which translated directly into orders, production scaling and progress toward a public listing.
Investors and founders framed these sponsorships as strategic capital‑market moves as much as marketing. With financing in the robotics and AI hardware space cooling, teams are using marquee media events to prove market appetite and to lubricate IPO and fundraising narratives. That makes the Gala less an ad buy than a piece of corporate signalling: can a weekend of national attention convert into repeat customers and hard orders?
If the Spring Festival Gala of 2026 proves anything, it is that China’s commercial centre of gravity is shifting. Where once the national stage amplified household‑consumer brands and spirits, it now serves as a live laboratory for platforms trying to own a new generation of interfaces — chat assistants, social features and embodied machines. Success will depend less on one‑off spectacles and more on the hard work of product differentiation, order fulfilment and meaningful integration into users’ lives.