十载创意启新篇 AI驱动增长破局——2026第十届麒麟国际创意节圆满落幕

This article summarizes key takeaways from the 10th Qilin International Creative Festival 2026, held in Shanghai to mark the event's 10th anniversary. Centered on the core theme of AI-powered growth, the festival brought together speakers from across sectors to share a wealth of actionable insights on brand marketing.

1. Core event overview: The festival opened a multi-stakeholder dialogue channel connecting consumer goods brands, creative agencies, AI technology firms and industrial capital, building a full-funnel discussion platform. The festival's Grand Prix was awarded to Yaohuo HOTOP for its "Scar Healing Initiative" campaign.

2. Actionable takeaways for audiences: The event featured multiple battle-tested marketing methodologies and tactics, including the BI+AI+DI integrated growth model for consumer goods, Laowannian Gold's "unpretentious" breakthrough strategy for Chinese luxury branding, and a actionable GEO marketing framework to capture space on new AI-enabled shelves. Multiple speakers also shared their outlooks on the development of the advertising industry in the AI era, helping general readers grasp the latest industry trends.

Centered on the core topic of AI-driven long-term brand growth, this year's Creative Festival delivered a large volume of actionable insights across all brand operation segments, offering high reference value for brands looking to drive growth in the AI era.

1. Actionable marketing strategies: The festival compiled multiple battle-tested differentiated marketing paths. For example, Laowannian Gold broke away from traditional luxury communication frameworks, prioritized topic building over pure product seeding on Xiaohongshu, and empowered in-store staff to create content, achieving rapid market penetration. For AI marketing, most brands currently struggle with low AI exposure and AI-generated content distortion. Brands can address this by deploying scientific GEO marketing to capture space on the new Prompt AI shelf, while avoiding gray and black market risks to maintain marketing compliance.

2. Growth and trend insights: The consumer industry is currently experiencing K-shaped divergence, with growth concentrated at the two ends of the market: ultra-value products and premium brands, while mid-range brands face stagnation. AI glasses represent a clear product opportunity as a new AI hardware form. Brands need to retain decision-making data to enable AI-powered self-iteration, and align brand power, product power and channel power to achieve sustainable growth.

The Creative Festival outlined new changes in the consumer goods market under the AI landscape, delivering clear opportunity alerts, risk warnings and actionable tactics for sellers, with strong reference value.

1. Market changes and opportunities: The consumer industry is currently experiencing K-shaped divergence: growth is concentrated in the two segments of ultra-value and premium brands, while the survival space of mid-range brands is continuously compressed, and traffic costs keep rising. AI glasses have emerged as a popular new product category, with one brand already launching the industry's first integrated AI glasses fitting store to solve pain points for myopic users, opening up new incremental opportunities for sellers.

2. Actionable tactics and risk warnings: Sellers can adopt the integrated BI+AI+DI growth model to align brand, product and channel capabilities. Sellers of luxury or premium categories can test the differentiated "unpretentious" communication strategy, build topics on Xiaohongshu, and empower consumers and in-store staff to create content to achieve breakout growth. Sellers should proactively deploy scientific GEO marketing to capture AI shelf space and solve the problem of insufficient AI traffic exposure, while remaining vigilant against gray and black industry risks and maintaining compliance.

3. Trend outlook: In the AI era, sellers need to retain decision-making data to support AI iteration, in order to capitalize on the industry opportunity of "good money driving out bad money".

Discussions at the Creative Festival centered on AI-driven brand growth have delivered multi-faceted insights on changing product demand, business opportunities and digital transformation for factories.

1. Product design demand and business opportunities: The consumer market is currently experiencing K-shaped divergence, with growing demand for both ultra-value and high-end products. Factories can adjust product planning and production to align with these two market segments to meet current consumer demand. In addition, AI glasses have emerged as a new AI product carrier, spawning new market demand for AI glasses fitting. One brand has already launched the first integrated fitting store, bringing new incremental business opportunities for upstream factories engaged in eyeglass manufacturing and AI hardware production.

2. Insights for digital transformation: The entire value chain requires data-enabled adaptation in the AI era. Factories need to accelerate digital transformation, and retain multi-dimensional data covering production, operations and user behavior to meet downstream brands' requirements for AI-powered decision iteration and align with broader industry trends. Factories can also leverage AI to improve efficiency in product design and production scheduling, to better adapt to fast-changing market demand.

The Creative Festival outlined the latest development trends of the marketing service industry in the AI era, identified core pain points of brand clients, and clarified the transformation direction for service providers, with strong actionable value.

1. Industry development trends: AI is reshaping the entire advertising and marketing industry. The industry as a whole continues to grow rapidly: China's total advertising industry revenue exceeded ¥2 trillion in 2025, with internet advertising growing more than 41%. AI has created a fair restart opportunity for the entire industry, and the future sector will see a new structure of concentrated leading players alongside a surge in solo practitioners, leaving broad room for growth.

2. Client pain points and transformation direction: After the new commercial link evolved into B2AI2B and B2AI2C, the core pain point for brand clients is widespread insufficient AI exposure and AI content distortion, creating demand for targeted solutions from service providers. Service providers can develop scientific GEO marketing technology tailored for large language models to help brands capture space on the new Prompt AI shelf. Creative service providers need to transform: rather than only selling content production capabilities, they should upgrade to help clients elevate product topics to broader social issues to create higher value, while building core capabilities in prompt engineering and AI output management.

The Creative Festival outlined new demands from various market participants to platforms in the AI era, delivering valuable insights for platform operation, ecosystem building and risk management.

1. Changing business demand: In the AI era, brands, service providers and creators have put forward new requirements for platforms. Brands need platforms to provide new infrastructure adapted for AI marketing to solve pain points of insufficient AI exposure and content distortion, and support data-driven iteration. Creators and service providers need platforms to provide supporting tools for AI-powered creation to unlock their creative potential.

2. Platform operation and recruitment direction: Platforms can capitalize on the opportunity of AI-driven industry restructuring. Following the Creative Festival's model, they can build a full-funnel matching platform connecting brands, agencies, AI technology firms and industrial capital, aggregate industry resources to empower participants, and attract high-quality marketing cases, innovative agencies and leading creators to settle, enrich platform ecosystem and boost platform influence.

3. Risk management insights: AI is evolving at an extremely fast pace, and first-mover advantages can easily be eroded. Platforms need to guide participating entities to continuously follow technological upgrades, standardize AI marketing practices, crack down on non-compliant gray and black marketing activities, and maintain a healthy, compliant platform ecosystem.

The 10th Qilin International Creative Festival reviewed the 10-year development of China's brand marketing industry, presented the latest trends, emerging issues and new business models of the marketing industry in the AI era, providing rich samples for industry research.

1. New industry trends: China's brand marketing industry has completed a full development cycle from the traditional 4A era, to digital marketing and social marketing, and now to AI-driven restructuring. The sector is now entering a golden decade for brand building. AI has become the new operating system for marketing, completely reshaping the logic of brand growth. The commercial link has evolved into B2AI2B and B2AI2C, with Prompt becoming a new type of AI shelf and GEO emerging as an entirely new marketing technology direction for large models.

2. New emerging industry issues: The consumer industry is experiencing K-shaped divergence, with traffic costs remaining persistently high. AI evolves extremely quickly, making first-mover advantages hard to retain. The advertising industry also faces core questions around how to reflect AI marketing value in service pricing and how to build benchmark AI marketing cases. AI will displace ordinary practitioners, and the industry is already starting to show clear dualistic structure characteristics.

3. New business model references: The event presented new business paradigms including the AI-driven full-funnel brand growth model and the scientific GEO marketing model, as well as the cross-stakeholder industry discussion and matching platform model, providing fresh new samples for industrial research.