From blind seeding to "precise seeding", Alimama uses AI to unlock greater growth potential.
In the Spring of Stable Traffic
At the beginning of 2026, a warm spring of AI and technology has arrived.
From the alternative red - envelope wars to the successive presentations of various Spring Festival Galas, the AI competition among major platforms has almost become the "second main theme" during the festival. Correspondingly, AI is infiltrating into daily life at an unprecedented speed, silently changing consumers' decision - making methods in areas such as search, dialogue, content generation, health services, and intelligent assistants.
When the consumption side has clearly accelerated, has the business side evolved synchronously?
For brands, the essence of the former business world was a traffic race. Big promotion nodes meant concentrated resources and increased budgets, and the volume and sales were boosted in a short period. Scale was the most intuitive indicator, and seizing positions was the most common strategy.
However, in today's environment, the market atmosphere has quietly changed: brands' excitement about "scale" is decreasing, while their anxiety about "efficiency" and "certainty" is increasing.
This is in sync with the changes on the demand side. Consumers get product recommendations on content platforms, confirm their choices in search scenarios, and make the final purchase in live - streaming rooms. The consumption path is becoming more and more network - like, but the budget is becoming more and more restricted. Brands are beginning to realize that simply expanding coverage is difficult to bring stable returns.
Against this background, the significance of the March 8th Festival as a consumption node has been re - emphasized.
It is the first major promotion after the Spring Festival and the starting point of the annual business rhythm. Alibaba Marketing Platform once disclosed a set of data. A high proportion of users accumulated during the March 8th event were converted in the subsequent 618 event, and a considerable number of 618 transaction users came from the visitors during the March 8th event.
Accurate user accumulation at a node will affect the transaction structure in subsequent cycles. For brands, actions at the current node may become the starting point of the annual business curve. For the capital market, the first major promotion at the beginning of the year often becomes a window to observe consumer confidence and platform capabilities.
In the new stage, new solutions are needed. On March 2nd, a round - table discussion centered around the March 8th Festival was held in Hangzhou. Alibaba Marketing Platform released a new strategy for the March 8th Festival, "Initiating a New Era with AI, Cultivating Growth Precisely", and at the same time, made on - site interpretations of new capabilities, new policies, and new directions.
At a time when the March 8th Festival is just around the corner, the discussion is obviously not limited to the deployment of a single node. Against the background of no longer high - speed traffic spillover, how can brands choose the right direction at the beginning of the year? How can the platform use AI to turn the spring product launches into the cornerstone of the annual business?
In this spring of accelerated AI evolution, Alibaba Marketing Platform is trying to provide a systematic answer to reshape business growth.
Initiating a New Era with AI, Cultivating Growth Precisely
Many brands still use the category - based thinking for advertising placement. They strive for a higher share in a large enough market, concentrate their budgets on high - frequency keywords and general traffic pools, and try to win market share through scale. This logic was effective in the stage of high - speed traffic expansion, but when the growth rate stabilizes, the marginal return is rapidly compressed. The competition is concentrated, the cost is transparent, and the space for differentiation is constantly squeezed. Continuing to use the old thinking, growth will only become more difficult and more expensive.
The reality is forcing brands to change their perspective. In an environment where the overall market is stabilizing, growth no longer comes from expanding coverage, but from re - dividing the structure. Based on this, Alibaba Marketing Platform has launched the Brand New Force WIN (Brand Metrics), providing a more suitable and accurate metric standard for brand management in a complex environment. W (Widespread) represents full - domain reach, measuring the breadth of exposure; I (Interaction) is about deepening interaction, representing the "depth of brand awareness cultivation"; N (Navigate), the brand search competitiveness, is the soul of the entire model, corresponding to users' active back - search behavior after being reached and interacting.
"The new opportunity for brand growth does not lie in making the existing categories more competitive, but in defining the track in advance." Hu Bao, the general manager of the brand business in the Marketing Department and Commercialization Operation Center of Alibaba Marketing Platform, mentioned a judgment in the round - table discussion. He believes that when traffic no longer overflows, the truly valuable thing is the ability to pre - position for trends.
The value of this model can already be seen in the practice of specific brands.
Take the functional skincare brand Murad as an example. In the highly competitive anti - aging track, it has to face the long - term brand awareness accumulation of international big brands and compete with high - cost - performance domestic brands. If it continues to compete head - on in the "general anti - aging population", it will only get caught in a high - cost and highly competitive situation. With the help of the AI panoramic insight of the Brand New Force WIN, the brand captured more specific high - frequency intents - the demand of outdoor people for "skin protection while playing" and the anxiety of commuters about "maintaining collagen with a light makeup look". Focusing on the niche trend of "active defensive anti - aging", Murad defined its track and carried out precise reach by segmenting ingredient - conscious consumers, high - conversion potential groups, and active users of competitors through the W, I, N layers. As a result, the sales of its A - alcohol product increased by 254% year - on - year during the product relaunch.
When trend judgment, population segmentation, and search reception are put into the same logic, growth is no longer just a traffic game, but the result of pre - positioning.
The WIN model provides a judgment framework, but after the track is locked, what really makes the difference is often the execution efficiency. That's why there is the core of the new strategy of "Initiating a New Era with AI, Cultivating Growth Precisely" for the March 8th Festival by Alibaba Marketing Platform, which is a comprehensive evolution from track insight, intent recognition to recommendation reception.
Initiating a new era with AI focuses on the intelligent improvement of the full - link business capabilities: efficiency is always the key variable in business.
The core value of AI capabilities is to make judgments more reliable: from product selection and creativity, to advertising optimization, and then to intent capture and precise matching, AI capabilities are entering more aspects.
At the creative end, material production has become learnable. The creative intelligent agent "Miaoying mio" outputs material suggestions by learning from the structures of industry hit products and combining with product selling points. This means that creativity is no longer completely dependent on inspiration, but can be disassembled, analyzed, and optimized.
The upgrade of landing page capabilities shortens the distance between clicks and transactions. Taobao Building Blocks 3Dlite enables white - background images to generate 3D effects. Data shows that the conversion rate (CVR) of single - product transactions has increased by 29%, the conversion rate of adding to cart and collection has increased by 16%, and the interaction time has increased by 13%. The gap between creativity and conversion is narrowed.
Materials are no longer just for expression, but have become an optimizable node in the business link. Content is no longer just an exposure action, but an optimizable part of the business link.
After materials, it comes to the advertising placement end. One of the most core pain points for merchants is the inaccurate judgment of advertising placement decisions. The upgrade of the "Platform Recommendation Plus" model of the full - site promotion actually changes the evaluation logic. The model introduces factors such as user preferences, emotional feedback indicators, price - band structure, and life - cycle dimensions, so that the judgment of product potential no longer only depends on historical performance, but returns to the competitive environment and population structure.
At the same time, the category - specific advertising placement capabilities and the refined ROI recommendation model are launched, allowing products with different profit structures to have a more suitable resource allocation logic. High - margin and high - conversion products are no longer competing under the same rules.
"AI is not a black box. It should become an interpretable and reviewable business assistant." Mo Li, the general manager of the performance advertising business in the Commercialization Operation Center of Alibaba Marketing Platform, said in the round - table discussion. In an era when budgets are more cautious, merchants need to understand the logic of each investment, rather than just seeing the result fluctuations.
For this purpose, the provided Xiaowan Pilot can generate plans through competitor learning, and Xiaowan Escort can achieve all - day automatic optimization and output reports. AI starts to participate in the decision - making process, rather than just staying at the execution level.
In the matching process, the intent recognition ability is further optimized. AI Pointing has been upgraded from word - matching to intent recognition. The scenarios and emotions behind long - tail expressions are included in the model's understanding scope. Scenario - based demands such as "hair - smoothing tools" and "gentle library outfits" can be captured by the system. The matching between keywords and the target population is closer to the real demand. The different motivations behind the same keyword are disassembled into multiple levels, and the population targeting becomes more refined.
At the same time, the automation capabilities at the execution level are also being launched. Automatic recharge avoids the suspension of advertising plans due to budget interruptions, and automatic rules complete intelligent investment increase and rhythm calibration during the monitoring and advertising placement process, amplifying the transaction amount and relieving the pressure of monitoring.
AI capabilities provide more accurate and efficient underlying support, initiating business in a new stage. When the judgment is more accurate, materials are more stable, and matching is more detailed, business operations have the possibility of being more refined.
"The so - called precise cultivation means to pre - position before the trend becomes crowded." Hu Bao disassembled "cultivating growth precisely" into four dimensions: track, population, content, and search. Simply put, the logic of "precise cultivation" is to break out of the highly competitive general categories and define one's own main battlefield before the trend is formed.
This means that the competition is no longer limited to traditional categories, but extends to more specific consumption scenarios. Brands such as Haier and OPPO, which have performed outstandingly before, have jointly built new track concepts such as "intelligent AI laundry and care" and "imaging flagship mobile phones" with Alibaba Marketing Platform. In essence, they are all pre - defining their growth positions.
Specifically, relying on AI insight capabilities, the Brand New Force WIN has currently disassembled more than 200 niche category tracks and supports brands to customize their own tracks. Brands can break out of the crowded general categories and use the WIN model to find a differentiated growth fast - lane in advance during the March 8th promotion.
However, the track is just the first step. For merchants, the real challenge often lies in the next step, population matching.
Especially during a traffic explosion node like the March 8th Festival, which coincides with the product launch window, if the cold start is delayed, it is very likely to miss the entire growth cycle. The competition within the same track is also more intense. Users who are recommended a product today may be attracted by competitors tomorrow.
To address this real - world challenge, the population - targeting capabilities of the WIN model have been upgraded. The strategy can be summarized in three words: grab, chase, and expand.
"Grab" means locking in competitors in the search field. As long as users show hesitation or interest in competitors in the search process, the system will conduct cross - identification and strongly intercept at key nodes to reduce the probability of being diverted; "Chase" is the dynamic identification of potential demands. During the product launch stage, the system not only focuses on those who have already searched, but also predicts users' next - step needs through cross - category association and motivation judgment, and completes the first - wave population aggregation in advance; "Expand" means expanding the high - potential population pool under the WIN model, locking in the wavering population who "want to buy but haven't", and enclosing the users closest to conversion into the asset pool through population radar and niche scenario mining.
When the trend track and the refined population form a closed - loop, "precise cultivation" can truly be sustainable, rather than a one - time explosion. However, after the population is locked, another problem arises: can the gap between recommendation and conversion be truly bridged?
Many merchants have a similar feeling: the exposure and interaction data seem good, but the search and transaction volume do not increase synchronously. The problem lies not in the traffic itself, but in the reception.
Based on the WIN model, relevant capabilities have further strengthened the reception and conversion links. "New Product Chief" precisely positions and receives the wavering population in the category keyword track; "Win Search Connect" integrates pre - event traffic inside and outside Taobao through AI population insight; "Showmax Full - Domain Pursuit" intercepts users' interests as soon as they return to Taobao; "Competition Breakthrough" conducts simultaneous product recommendation in the content link of competing products. Product recommendation is no longer just about generating buzz at the front - end, but forms a closed - loop at the search and transaction ends.
In the stage of stable traffic, growth no longer depends on scale accumulation, but on pre - judgment and rhythm control. AI provides the underlying capabilities, precise cultivation forms business operations, and growth is the final result.
The Brand New Force WIN model and the strategy of "Initiating a New Era with AI, Cultivating Growth Precisely" respond to a more long - term question: how to find one's own growth path among complex touchpoints.
How to Converge the Mesh - like Consumer Touchpoints into a Linear Consumer Journey
In actual business operations, merchants' anxiety is more specific than the surface data.
Users are recommended products in short - videos, read product reviews on social media, and finally place orders in the search bar or live - streaming rooms. The touchpoints are scattered, and the paths are fragmented. From the merchants' perspective, this is completely a black box. There are data on content views and interactions, and orders can be seen at the transaction end, but the paths between them are completely broken. The budget invested seems to achieve results on different platforms separately, but it is difficult to connect the cause and effect in the overall business situation.
This anxiety has become stronger this year. There are more and more touchpoints, and the boundaries between channels are becoming more and more blurred. Merchants can only see isolated processes and final results, but it is difficult to track the complete conversion link.
How to reorganize these scattered touchpoints into a trackable and reviewable journey? This is also the core pain point that Alibaba Marketing Platform's full - domain capabilities aim to solve.
"Full - domain operation is not just about expanding channels, but about complementing the cross - scenario identification and collaboration capabilities." In the round - table discussion, Xue Yuan,