WIRED Middle East: The Online World as Our Second Home

Want a quick, smart pulse on China’s fast-moving digital scene? This week’s China Digital Digest breaks down five big moves — from Doubao’s AI-phone comeback and Tencent’s WorkBuddy roll‑out to Zhipu AI selling token plans on Tmall and a nationwide cleanup of AI-generated content. Why it matters: these shifts reshape how brands, platforms and marketers design products, partnerships and moderation strategies. Read it if you’re planning regional campaigns, evaluating AI partnerships, or building content moderation playbooks. Got questions about how any of these trends affect your strategy in Singapore or the region? Ask away — we love digging into implications and turning insight into action. 🔍 Read the full digest: https://wix.to/2Mt0F4d #digitalmarketing #regionaltrends #marketinganalytics

Day two of Digital Marketing Asia 2026 is live at Shangri-La Singapore, where 600+ marketing leaders are working through agentic AI, predictive journeys and collapsing clicks. 🚀 The thread: as AI answers absorb the click, visibility goes to brands that trusted publishers already cite. Earned editorial links make a brand retrievable — and credible — across engines, markets and answer surfaces. TraffiClimb builds those citations with vetted publishers, for direct brands and agency white-label. 📈 #DigitalMarketingAsia #LinkBuilding #DigitalPR #GEO

What if scientists became the new celebrities? 🔬⭐ Recently, several Chinese cities have replaced expensive commercial ads with giant posters celebrating scientists such as 钱学森 (Qián Xuésēn) and 邓稼先 (Dèng Jiàxiān), putting them front and center in shopping malls, subway stations, and digital billboards. The campaign sparked an interesting conversation: in an internet culture dominated by celebrities and online traffic, what does it mean to make scientists the people we look up to? A few useful Chinese expressions 👀 引发关注 (yǐnfā guānzhù) 👉 to draw attention / spark interest 相继跟进 (xiāngjì gēnjìn) 👉 to follow suit one after another 映入眼帘 (yìngrù yǎnlián) 👉 to catch one’s eye / come into view 顶流 (dǐngliú) 👉 top celebrity / internet star 人设 (rénshè) 👉 public persona / carefully constructed image 流量洼地 (liúliàng wādì) 👉 a “traffic lowland” / place lacking online attention What makes this especially interesting is the contrast with today’s 流量文化. Scientists are being presented not because of their popularity or marketing, but because of their dedication to research and contribution to society. The campaign also raises a broader question about how public spaces and media can shape the people we see as role models. In our latest Mandarin Zest article, we explore China’s unusual campaign to turn scientists into public “idols” and what it says about fame, algorithms, and modern Chinese internet culture. 👇 https://lnkd.in/gSzaphx8

"“Delighting people is a great marketing strategy. Higher ed needs to get a little lighter, to get a little more like funny and interesting and a little less pompous. "And we have it. We have all kinds of things we can put in that space. We just aren’t in the habit of doing that, because we’re not in the habit of meeting people where they are and bringing all of the parts of our culture and community into those spaces instead of just the prestige ones. "And it turns out when we do that, people respond.” I finally got around to listening to Tracey Halvorsen's interview with Carol Keese, VP Comms and CMO at the University of Oregon, and it was *excellent.* They cover so many important aspects of the higher ed trust gap (including its response to AI), but this quote is what will stick with me most. In higher ed marketing—and *especially* in advancement comms—we need to get back into the "delight" business. https://lnkd.in/geHFx-tT

Mondelēz adapts digital commerce as AI reshapes search Mondelēz International is reworking assortment, content, and media execution across digital channels as online growth becomes harder to sustain through distribution expansion alone. Full story here: https://bit.ly/3TkYIEz

HONG KONG | AI is changing how media is planned, bought and measured. But as the technology becomes more sophisticated, one question is becoming harder to avoid: how confident are we that we’re making better media decisions? Our latest Changemakers Club Breakfast brought senior marketing leaders together in Hong Kong, hosted by Nellie Chan, Chair of The Marketing Society Hong Kong, and Hina Wainwright, Vice-Chair of The Marketing Society, in partnership with PubMatic. Bringing senior marketing leaders together at Soho House, the conversation explored how brands are approaching media investment in a landscape where AI is increasingly influencing planning, optimisation and measurement. One question in particular got to the heart of the discussion: Where do you feel most confident, and least confident, in proving media ROI today as AI becomes more embedded in planning, buying and measurement? From confidence in the data to the role of human judgement, the conversation highlighted an important tension. AI can give marketers more tools, more information and greater speed, but smarter decision-making still depends on knowing what to ask, what to trust and where strategic judgement needs to come in. A big thank you to Nellie Chan, Hina Wainwright and PubMatic for bringing the conversation to the room, and to everyone who contributed their experiences and perspectives so openly. These are the conversations that make the Changemakers Club valuable: senior marketers coming together to question what’s changing, compare what they’re seeing and work through the questions that don’t always have straightforward answers. #TheMarketingSociety #Changemakers #HongKong #MediaEffectiveness #MediaStrategy Andreas Krasser Kiri Sinclair Edward Bell Nixon Cheung Geraldine Chew Andrea de Vincentiis Ewa Stachurska Ivy Cheung Jiunn Shih Hilda Chan Sophie Devonshire⚡️Brynie B McBurney Sudipto Das Bob Wang Meng Yun W. Ning (Alice) Ren

Backlinks were so damn important that Brian Dean named Backlinko after them. For 25 years, links were one of Google’s clearest signals that a page was trustworthy. But the logic behind backlinks is older than the web. Larry Page and Sergey Brin applied the same idea used to count academic citations when they built PageRank. AI search is changing the signal again. My second Backlinko video follows that idea from footnotes to PageRank to the AI answers we see today. https://lnkd.in/gxC2D6zZ

Here's something most European brands don't realize about Zhihu: the answer you publish today can keep working for years. Why? In 2026, Zhihu content feeds directly into six of China's leading AI models, including Baidu Ernie, KIMI, Qwen, Yuanbao (Tencent), DeepSeek, and Doubao (Bytedance). When a Chinese decision-maker asks an AI assistant a technical question, these models often pull from Zhihu to shape their answer. So a single well-researched post isn't just thought leadership. It becomes durable content infrastructure that supports your CN website, Tencent articles, and sales materials, all at once. The catch? These assets take real effort to build, and they compound in value over time. Want to understand how it works? Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/deJpANNr Or reach out to our team on this link: https://lnkd.in/dPXsqzM2 #B2BMarketing #ChinaMarket #Zhihu #GEO

Nestlé wants 35,000+ pieces of content a year in Greater China, and it's asking WPP and AI to deliver them. The new model runs social, creators, commerce, media and production through WPP Open | China. The real test is whether a shared AI layer can scale output without flattening distinct brand identities. Is this the future operating model for big brand portfolios? https://lnkd.in/dbfinBNF WPP Media Allen Cai

Campaign UK asked the industry what it makes of WPP’s move to bring more production in-house. Our MD Tristan Harrison’s view: genuine competition means genuinely different companies, talent, creative approaches and ways of solving the brief. He also makes the case for independents as a source of experimentation, particularly as AI and production technology move quickly. Read Tristan’s take alongside the wider industry reaction. Thanks Ida Axling and Lucy Shelley for featuring this input; link below. #Advertising #Production #CreativeProduction #IndependentProduction