China’s flagship New Year television ritual has turned into an unlikely battleground for the country’s biggest AI players. This Lunar New Year, Alibaba’s Qianwen plastered its brand across four major provincial galas and backed that visibility with a reported 30 billion yuan spring marketing war‑chest; ByteDance’s Volcano Engine served as CCTV’s exclusive AI cloud partner for the national gala; Tencent and Baidu deployed 10 billion and 5 billion yuan hongbao campaigns respectively inside their social and search ecosystems. The spectacle combined old‑fashioned sponsorship, live promotional giveaways and visible technical showpieces: XR stages, embodied robots sharing the stage with pop stars, and interactive, model‑generated content embedded in family viewing scenarios.
For platforms and broadcasters the motives are straightforward. The Spring Festival Gala is the year’s densest concentration of family attention — a rare, recurring moment when multi‑generational households gather in front of a single screen. For AI companies it offers both massive reach and an opportunity to demonstrate everyday utility: automated ticketing, AI‑written couplets, voice or text prompts to order dinner or buy movie tickets. Local stations welcomed the technology as a way to cut production costs and boost novelty: virtual sets and AIGC reduced the need for elaborate physical builds and solved complex staging problems, while younger audiences streamed and commented on new media platforms in numbers that skew far below traditional broadcast averages.
The corporate playbook has been visible and repeatable: four participation modes dominate — title sponsorship and on‑screen branding, cash‑back red packets to drive short‑term downloads, technical services powering the broadcast and interaction layers, and the embedding of AI services into concrete consumption moments during the show. Alibaba’s Qianwen tied its subsidies to a wider ecosystem of services — from food delivery to flight bookings — encouraging viewers to try voice or text prompts such as “Qianwen help me buy movie tickets.” That tactic produced a spike: cinemas orders placed via that command reportedly rose 500 percent on a single day. ByteDance used the gala to roll out Seedance 2.0, a video‑generation model, and to stage multiple prize draws; Bilibili focused on an improved danmaku experience for younger viewers.
But the headline numbers mask a harder business question: can the flood of ephemeral holiday traffic be converted into sustained usage? Industry insiders and veteran advertisers caution that festival attention is time‑limited and intensely promotion‑sensitive. A hongbao cliff often follows the gala curtain: downloads, visits and one‑off interactions spike while subsidies last, then fall back. The crucial metrics for AI platforms are not single‑night impressions but retention rates, repeated daily utility, payment conversion and longer‑term ecosystem binding 97 all of which are costlier and slower to achieve.
Beyond retention, the gala entry points illustrate a broader shift in China’s advertising and media economy. For decades the Spring Festival slot sold to consumer staples, household appliances and liquor brands seeking a trusted family‑time audience. In 2026 those categories share the stage with intangible digital services that promise to rewire everyday behaviors. That change is commercial as well as cultural: broadcasters can demonstrate relevance and modernity, platforms can recruit older users by showing simple, familiar scenarios, and local stations can use AI to punch above their production budgets and compete with CCTV.
This frenzied competition also raises strategic and regulatory questions. Heavy subsidies can distort market signals and encourage aggressive cross‑promotion across payment, delivery and ticketing services. The rapid embedding of AI into public cultural rituals tests public tolerance for overt commercialisation of national traditions. Finally, as technical demonstrations migrate from studio backlots into households, questions about data flows, privacy and the real‑world reliability of model outputs will move centre stage for regulators and consumers alike.
For now the spring gala has become a convenient, high‑visibility demo day for Chinese AI firms. The long game, however, will be won or lost in the quieter months that follow: who can translate a one‑night surge in curiosity into habitual command‑and‑control of everyday tasks, and who will be left with a short‑lived bump in metrics and a depleted marketing budget?