Spring Festival Marketing: AI Beyond Bulk Content Creation – How Brands Build Interactive Content Systems
Every Lunar New Year, brands face a highly repetitive yet unavoidable set of content production tasks: New Year films, zodiac posters, festival e-commerce pages, digital red envelopes and greetings, store POS materials, short videos, livestreaming assets, and platform-specific format adaptations.
In the past, brands typically produced a single hero brand film and then sliced it into short clips, posters, stickers, and social copy. While this solved content distribution, it failed to solve a fundamental question: Why should consumers participate in this content, and what can they do after watching it?
AI's value cannot be boiled down to merely "faster" and "cheaper." If AI is only used to re-render a traditional brand film into ten aspect ratios, twenty copy variations, and dozens of short clips, it certainly improves operational efficiency, but it does not change the core content logic of Spring Festival marketing.
The truly meaningful shift in Spring Festival marketing is this: Can a brand transform a Spring Festival cultural theme into a content system that users can participate in, personalize, and act upon?
This means the atomic unit of holiday content is no longer a static brand video, but a triggerable cultural scene.
First, Let's Answer a Question: Is AI Just a Production Tool for Holiday Content?
Yes—and that is currently its most mature capability.
AI helps brands quickly execute:
- Multi-platform adaptations of a single core creative idea;
- Visual and copy variations tailored to different products, regions, and demographics;
- Visual extensions of zodiac characters, gift boxes, packaging, and holiday settings;
- Bulk creation of short videos, posters, holiday greetings, and livestream materials;
- Multi-language, multi-size, and phased rollout content localization.
These capabilities matter because Spring Festival campaigns feature concentrated timelines, dense touchpoints, and numerous asset variations. However, they primarily represent value at the production level.
If the brand's core brief remains "shoot a warm holiday film," AI simply speeds up delivery. Only when the brand changes the brief to "let consumers enter this holiday scenario in their own way" does AI truly enter the content layer.
The distinction can be summarized in one sentence:
AI may not invent the Spring Festival creative idea for a brand, but it can reshape how consumers enter, participate in, and continue using that idea.
What Content-Level Changes Emerged in Recent LNY Campaigns?
In recent Spring Festival marketing cycles, the most illustrative cases didn't all come from traditional FMCG ad spots. Many shifts first appeared in brand interactions, platform services, and user co-creation mechanisms.
Yili: AI Doesn't Just Generate Content; It Organizes Co-Creation
Yili built a campaign around a viral user topic connecting the Chinese actress Ma Yili with the Year of the Horse. The brand first responded to community suggestions and then converted the topic into a nationwide spring couplet co-creation campaign, inviting cultural figures, celebrities, and netizens to write couplets.
In this campaign, the AI account "Comment Robert" engaged in real-time couplet matching, while intelligent filtering systems curated and displayed top submissions. According to IAI case records, the project collected over 16,000 quality couplet responses and triggered over 20,000 AI interactions.
Here, AI's value was not writing a couplet on behalf of the brand, but giving instant feedback and continuous exposure to a massive volume of user-generated content. The brand proposed an open theme, users built upon it, and AI lowered the operational cost of high-volume interaction.
This fundamentally alters the content structure: the brand no longer releases a finished artwork, but builds a continuous, interactive cultural space.
Feihe: AI Allows Users to Enter the Content Themselves
The "Smart Baby Celebrates Year of the Dragon" campaign by Meitu and Feihe demonstrated another form of personalized content.
Centering on mothers sharing baby photos and family memories during LNY, the campaign used AI to generate festive family photos, dynamic recipes, and stickers featuring brand visual signatures. Users could place their children into traditional folk stories and New Year scenes, producing family-centric holiday content.
Official Meitu metrics indicate the project generated 5.26 million AI photos, achieved a 93% photo save rate, and logged millions of sticker interactions.
The key here was not producing more official brand visuals, but giving every user their own version of the holiday. Traditional folk stories were no longer just background footage in a brand film; consumers and their families became the main characters.
This is a shift at the content level: AI transformed Spring Festival culture from "the brand telling a story to consumers" into "consumers expressing themselves through their own image."
Source: Meitu x Feihe | "Smart Baby Celebrates Year of the Dragon" AI Portrait Innovation Campaign
Coca-Cola: AI Enters the Holiday Experience, Not Just Post-Production
Coca-Cola's campaign integrated immersive firework shows in Chongqing, nationwide livestreams, offline activations, QR-triggered AI experiences, social content, digital stickers, and holiday merchandise.
In this framework, AI was not a hidden technology buried in post-production. Users actively triggered AI, engaged with interactive mechanics, and obtained personalized content while attending offline events or browsing social feeds.
This shows that brands can place AI where consumers directly experience it: instead of telling audiences "this video was made by AI," brands let users interact with, trigger, and receive a personal deliverable through AI during the holiday.
Source: Ogilvy China | Coca-Cola 2026 Chinese New Year Campaign
Doubao and Qianwen: Holiday Content Connecting to Services and Commerce
Doubao partnered with the Spring Festival Gala, offering real-time lyric translation, background context, and interactive features during the live broadcast. Caixin reported that Doubao logged 1.9 billion interactions during the Gala, with users generating over 50 million themed avatars and sending 100 million holiday blessings.
The significance extends beyond adding an AI sponsor to the broadcast: it turned passive viewing into querying, generating, sharing, and participating.
Alibaba's Qianwen went a step further by connecting AI directly to consumer actions. Users could make natural language requests for milk tea, dining, or holiday gift purchases, which Qianwen parsed, recommended, and fulfilled via Alibaba's ecosystem. AdQuan reported over 10 million orders placed within 9 hours of launch.
While brand advertisers cannot directly duplicate platform-scale commerce engines without identical ecosystem assets, these cases reveal an unmistakable trend: content touchpoints during LNY can move beyond "buy after watching" toward "accomplish a holiday task directly inside the content."
Source: Caixin | ByteDance’s Doubao Dominates Spring Festival Gala With 1.9 Billion AI Interactions
Source: AdQuan | Qianwen Ignites LNY with 3 Billion RMB: AI Task Habits Are Forming
What Part of Spring Festival Content Is AI Actually Changing?
Synthesizing these examples reveals four distinct roles for AI in holiday marketing.
Role 1: Content Generator
This is the most common role.
AI generates visuals, audio, copy, subtitles, and format variations rapidly, helping brands manage output volume and speed during peak season.
It solves: "How do we make content faster?"
Role 2: Content Participation Interface
In Yili's couplet campaign, AI provided instant feedback on user submissions; in Coca-Cola's campaign, users scanned QR codes to unlock AI experiences.
It solves: "How do users enter the brand's cultural theme?"
Role 3: Personalized Content Engine
In Feihe's campaign, parents placed their children into tailored holiday stories and brand visuals.
It solves: "How does one universal theme become personalized for every individual?"
Role 4: Action and Service Portal
In Qianwen's campaign, natural language requests led directly to product fulfillment, dining, and travel services.
It solves: "What action can the user take immediately after consuming content?"
While Role 1 improves production efficiency, Roles 2, 3, and 4 actively reshape holiday content experiences and user behaviors.
Content Matrices Are Not Enough: Brands Need a Spring Festival Content System
A traditional "content matrix" is usually a distribution checklist:
- 1 Hero Brand Film;
- 1 Set of Zodiac Posters;
- 1 Suite of E-commerce Campaign Pages;
- A few Short Videos;
- Digital Red Envelopes & Greetings;
- In-Store and Livestream Materials.
While helpful for scheduling production and placement, this matrix rarely drives real consumer participation.
A modern content system suited for the AI era requires four key components:
1. Cultural Theme: What Feeling Does the Brand Want to Convey?
A zodiac animal is merely an external symbol, not a strategy. The brand must define the underlying relationship and emotion—reunion, gifting, coming home, companionship, renewal, blessings, or sharing.
The cultural theme ensures all downstream content variations stay aligned and gives consumers a clear entry point.
2. Content Assets: Reusable Characters, Products, and Symbols
Brands must establish core reusable assets early: hero products, packaging, zodiac characters, IP, original music, character relationships, visual rules, and brand tone.
These assets should not exist solely for a single film; they must be modular. Characters can deliver personalized blessings, original audio can power user-generated clips, and packaging assets can extend into store displays and livestreams.
3. Participation Mechanism: What Can the User Actually Do?
Asking consumers to "join the conversation" is too vague. Brands need concrete action triggers:
- Complete a couplet;
- Generate a personalized zodiac avatar;
- Place family members into a holiday story;
- Receive tailored gift recommendations based on budget and relationship;
- Generate custom AI greeting messages;
- Scan a code to unlock a localized holiday experience;
- Join a viral content challenge.
The clearer the mechanism, the easier it is for AI to function as an interactive experience rather than an invisible back-room tool.
4. Action Portal: What Comes Next?
After generating an image, can the user share it with family? After completing an interaction, can they jump to an e-commerce store, retail outlet, loyalty portal, or livestream? After receiving a greeting card, can they send it onward?
Content behaviorization ensures the journey doesn't end when viewing stops.
Yili "Fortune Cow": From Hero Film to Core Holiday Asset
The Yili "Fortune Cow" campaign illustrates how FansAI builds reusable holiday content assets.
The core challenge was not simply producing a festive video, but orchestrating dairy products, animal characters, prosperity narratives, gift boxes, and original music into a cohesive, shareable story system.
The project utilized AI for music composition, lyric generation, and asset matching across packaging, characters, and video outputs. It proved several foundational capabilities:
- Translating selling points into narrative characters and stories;
- Developing mascot characters into persistent content assets;
- Using original audio to build brand recall;
- Maintaining visual and emotional consistency across products, packaging, and video.
However, a clear distinction must be made: available records verify that "Fortune Cow" established a complete core holiday asset, not that it deployed a fully integrated interactive matrix or transaction service.
The strategic question for brands moving forward is: Once a core holiday asset is built, how can it extend into e-commerce, custom greetings, POS materials, short videos, user co-creation, and gifting scenarios?
This is the difference between a static matrix and a content system.
A content matrix solves distribution across touchpoints; a content system solves how users invoke and interact with content to take action across those touchpoints.
What Brands Should Procurement Focus On (It's Not "Bulk AI Output")
On the surface, holiday procurement briefs ask for videos, posters, and social banners. In practice, brands should evaluate whether a vendor can deliver four core capabilities:
1. Can they define a cultural theme before generating visuals?
Without a clear understanding of consumer relationships, emotions, and holiday contexts, AI will simply output generic festive imagery at scale.
2. Can they break the hero creative into modular, reusable assets?
Whether characters, music, product shots, and visual rules can be continuously repurposed determines if the hero film functions as a master asset system.
3. Can they design mechanisms users genuinely want to participate in?
Mechanisms for uploading photos, generating greetings, or sharing content must align with real consumer behaviors during LNY, rather than treating interactivity as a floating UI button.
4. Can they connect content directly to commerce and service journeys?
Whether content guides users smoothly into e-commerce, stores, livestreams, or loyalty programs determines if content behaviorization actually succeeds.
AI production efficiency is important, but it should never be the sole benchmark for agency capability.
Limited Budget? Validate Content Behaviorization in Phases
Not every brand needs to build a custom AI shopping agent, loyalty integration, or proprietary app from day one.
Behaviorized content can start with lightweight implementations:
- Leverage existing mini-programs, stores, or social channels to handle interactions;
- Focus interactive features around a single hero product or key IP;
- Launch a simple gift-selection quiz or personalized greeting builder;
- Validate whether users actively participate, save, and share;
- Scale integration into inventory, loyalty, stores, and checkout systems based on real user response.
Budget and organizational readiness determine how deep the implementation goes, but a tight budget does not restrict you to a traditional brand video. The key is validating consumer response in a lightweight scenario first.
This is why brands must ask AI service partners: Are you delivering a set of static assets, or a reusable system of content rules, character assets, interaction mechanics, and data feedback?
Conclusion: The Next Step in Holiday Marketing Is Not Asking AI to "Celebrate LNY for You"
AI does not automatically create cultural resonance, nor can it replace human cultural judgment.
The emotional nuances, human relationships, and shared cultural experiences essential to Spring Festival marketing must still originate from human strategists and creative teams. What AI changes is how these cultural themes live: they no longer stay locked inside a 60-second film, but expand into homes, social chats, retail environments, and digital services.
Yili proved AI can deliver instant feedback for mass co-creation; Feihe showed AI can personalize festive memories for individual families; Coca-Cola integrated AI into physical activations and live feeds; Doubao and Qianwen demonstrated how content directly drives queries, generation, and purchases.
The common denominator across these cases is not a specific generative model, but a shared objective: making content an ongoing experience that users continue, customize, and convert into action.
When planning your next Spring Festival campaign, ask four questions:
- What cultural theme do we want consumers to feel and remember?
- How can consumers actively participate in this theme?
- How can AI generate personalized variations tailored to different people, relationships, and settings?
- Once users participate, how do they naturally transition into sharing, purchasing, or using a service?
When these four questions have clear answers, AI evolves from a production tool into a content system that brings the spirit of the holiday to life.