In China, the chief marketing officer is an algorithm
On October 22, Mango TV launched a new reality show, 后会友期 (hòu huì yǒu qī, “one day, friendship finds its way back”). The concept fits in one sentence: two former Super Girl 2006 contestants, Xu Fei and Li Na, meet again twenty years later to try to mend a friendship broken by the competition.
Nothing destined this program to become a national event. Then a line escaped the screen. “我画地为牢啊，厉娜”: “I locked myself in my own prison, Li Na.” The sentence began circulating in short videos, reposted, remixed, commented on, to the point that Mango TV built it into its own promotion. On October 30, the show captured 77.1% of the country’s effective variety-show views, unheard of in 2026. Since October 30, Mango Super Media’s share price has gained 55%, including 20% in a single session on November 2, the maximum daily move allowed on the Chinese market, for a market capitalization of around 65 billion yuan (€8.7 billion).
But the most interesting part happened away from the producer. Li Na eats duck tongues on screen. On November 3, Juewei, the spicy duck snack giant, issued an apology on Xiaohongshu: duck tongues were out of stock nationwide. The blanket of the sponsor 999 (the traditional Chinese medicine equivalent of Tylenol) became a coveted object. The 袁记 dumplings associated with the show sold by the tens of thousands of group-buy orders on Douyin. In ten days, a program about friendship moved a listed stock, emptied shelves and made the fleeting fortune of brands that had asked for nothing.
No marketing plan produced this. The algorithm did.
The short term: a machine that converts emotion into impulse
Seen from European headquarters, Douyin, Xiaohongshu and WeChat are often thought of as China’s Instagram, YouTube and Facebook: media budget lines that send traffic to retailers. That is a category error. In China, content (the short video, the show, the blog), community, commerce and payment have merged. Increasingly, the journey does not begin with a need; it begins with an emotion: you are moved by a friendship being repaired, amused by a line, touched by a detail, and the product glimpsed in that moment inherits the emotion you have just felt. You read what your peers say about it, you order, you pay, without ever leaving the app. The purchase is no longer the end point of a search; it is often the by-product of an emotion the content triggered, turned into a gesture because the checkout is one finger away from the screen.
We need to measure what the algorithm actually does in this chain, because it does not merely distribute videos. It tests, continuously, which emotion makes people stay, comment, buy; it identifies within a few hours that nostalgia for a twenty-year-old friendship converts better tonight than anything else; and it then pours that same emotion onto hundreds of millions of screens, each served at the hour it is most receptive. This is manipulation of emotions through amplification, in the literal sense and without moral judgment: the system spots what moves people and amplifies it to saturation, because emotion is what converts. On the evening of November 2, millions of people did not buy duck tongues; they bought Xu Fei and Li Na’s reconciliation, in an 80-gram pack. Impulse buying, which Western marketing has worked on for a century with end-of-aisle displays, is industrialized here: detected, triggered, served and cashed in within the same app, within the same minute.
The scale is dizzying: 1.125 billion internet users at the end of 2025, 32.5 hours a week online, 814 million live-streaming users. Douyin alone accounts for around 3,500 billion yuan in annual sales, third behind Tmall and Pinduoduo. In this closed loop, the algorithm sees everything: what moves people, what holds them, what makes them click. The platform is therefore not a medium that talks about the store; it is at once the store, the marketing department, the customer review and the community.
The medium term: 软文 in the algorithmic age, or steered opinion
The short term makes the headlines; yet it is the long term that should occupy executive committees. Because the same system serves a purpose other than selling duck tongues: it serves to install opinions. Deep-seated convictions about what a good product is, a category, a fair price; and sometimes, convictions about competitors’ products.
The technique is not new. China has practiced it for decades under the name 软文 (ruǎnwén, “the soft article”): advertorial disguised as sincere testimony, paid praise that does not say its name. What is new is its integration into the algorithm, and there, its power changes by an order of magnitude. Yesterday, a ruanwen was an article in a magazine; it reached its readers, once. Today, it is a campaign of thousands of coordinated pieces of content: repeated short videos, long-form articles, tiered influencers (headliners for reach, mid-tier accounts for credibility, ordinary consumers for social proof), from which the algorithm selects the variants that catch on, discards those that do not, and serves the survivors to the most receptive audiences. Opinion is no longer published; it is steered: tested, optimized, amplified, like a product.
This is how local brands redefine entire categories, sometimes against you. The Chinese challenger that explicitly positions itself against the foreign brand does not do it once; it does it ten thousand times:
Them, the 老登 brand (lǎodēng, slang for “out-of-touch old man,” the equivalent of our “boomer”); us, the one young people are scrambling for.
Them, yesterday’s technology at a premium; us, disruption at a low price.
Them, the expensive imported product; us, the clever local version
Repeated, adapted, optimized, this framing ends up becoming the category’s shared reference. This is the risk headquarters measure least well: on Chinese platforms, your brand is not what you say it is. It is co-defined, every day, by creators, customers and competitors. A claim repeated without response ends up becoming your identity card.
One nuance, which is also the system’s limit: my field conversations show that Chinese consumers, the most exposed in the world to these techniques, have developed antibodies. They spot sponsored content and discount it; they call out orchestrated comments; they trust independent comparisons and ordinary users, not brands. Manipulation can light a fire and steer a doubt; what settles durably is the narrative that the product experience confirms. The algorithm amplifies; it does not make things true.
Take-aways: surf fast, defend for the long haul
In the short term: learn to surf, in both directions, and decide in China. Exposure arrives without warning, positive or negative, and speed decides who captures it. In June, a Xiaohongshu user mocked a machine-translated Adidas product listing (进城办事, “going into town to run errands,” to describe a T-shirt); the hashtag climbed Weibo’s trending list. Adidas corrected it, responded with self-deprecation under the posts, then launched limited-edition T-shirts within a few days: tens of millions of views turned into sales (I told this story in detail in “Adidas China chose the side of humans ”). The condition for this agility is not creative, it is organizational: a local team mandated to decide within hours, with pre-approved guardrails, without escalating to headquarters. An approval chain is structurally slower than a meme; on Chinese social media, silence amounts to a confession. And before surfing, check the logistics: Juewei won national attention and lost the sale, for lack of stock. A meme is a cash advance of attention, and it does not fix a business model.
In the medium to long term: defend your identity with proof, and cultivate conviction with the algorithm, not against it.
- Your first defensive asset is a product whose every verifiable detail (composition, price, origin, claims) survives scrutiny by millions of well-equipped consumers; product-message consistency is no longer a virtue, it is a line of defense.
- The second is a narrative presence tended like a garden: continuously feeding the platforms with verifiable content, working all three tiers of influence down to the ordinary consumers who provide social proof, monitoring what is said about you and your category the way you monitor market share, and responding before the opposing claim becomes the reference.
- The algorithm has no qualms: it amplifies what it is given and what engages. Brands that treat it as a media line are at its mercy; those that treat it as a field of operations, with a team, objectives and decision rights, have turned it into a marketing department. The question to ask in committee is not “how much do we spend on the platforms,” but “who has the right to decide there, how fast, and who cultivates our truth while others cultivate theirs.”