What do your China livestreaming marketing services actually include?

Strategy and platform selection, account setup and cross-border qualification, host casting and training, script and offer design, set and studio production, pre-broadcast seeding and paid amplification, live compliance monitoring, and post-broadcast clipping and reporting. Most engagements draw on part of that scope rather than all of it. We agree the shape after understanding the commercial objective, because a single origin broadcast and a daily brand room need very different things.

Do we need a Chinese entity to run a livestream in China?

Not necessarily. There are three routes: a mainland entity such as a WFOE, a licensed local partner operating on your behalf, or a cross-border store under a platform’s global merchant programme. Each carries different permissions, commission structures and category restrictions. Cross-border requirements tightened during 2026, with platforms asking for dual verification of overseas production and circulation, registered trademarks rather than pending applications, and a documented authorisation chain. We assess which route fits your situation before any commitments are made.

Which platform should we livestream on?

It follows from the objective. Douyin has the deepest commerce infrastructure and the largest live audience, and suits volume and rapid conversion. Xiaohongshu’s buyer livestreams suit premium, considered purchases where full price needs protecting. Taobao Live remains strong for established marketplace brands. Weibo works alongside a broader awareness campaign. Fliggy and Douyin’s local-life inventory are where hotels, restaurants and destinations sell. Most of our clients end up on two, not five.

What is the difference between brand-owned livestreaming and a creator-led livestream?

A creator livestream borrows someone else’s audience for a session: fast reach, instant credibility, and you keep nothing afterwards. Brand self-broadcast is your own room, your own host and your own schedule: slow to build, but you retain margin, customer data and followers, and the platforms reward the consistency. The two work best together — creators to generate initial demand, an owned room to convert it repeatedly.

Can we use an AI host or virtual presenter?

Yes, AI hosts are widely used in China for overnight and low-intensity broadcasts. Under the current Measures, AI-generated presenters and imagery must be labelled continuously and clearly as artificial, and responsibility for any unlawful content rests with the party operating the room. For premium brands we generally advise using AI hosts to extend coverage outside peak hours rather than to replace a human presenter during the sessions that matter.

How much does livestreaming in China cost?

It depends on format, frequency, host tier and media investment, so we scope after understanding the objective. What we can tell you is where budgets leak. A creator booking is not a single fee — it is a pit fee, commission, samples, an MCN margin and paid traffic, and the total often lands at two to three times the headline number. A brand-owned room costs more to start and materially less per broadcast once it is established. We usually recommend a defined pilot with a commercial target attached before anyone commits to a long-term cadence.

Livestreaming Marketing Services in China

From Choosing the Appropriate Platform to Working with the Right Host: Our Approach to Livestreaming

Running a successful livestreaming event in China requires far more than simply choosing a platform and going live. In between planning the event and executing it, hundreds of micro-decisions need to be taken: brands need to select the most appropriate Chinese social media platform, find a host who can represent the brand credibly, select a suitable format and, most importantly, pick the right objective. For luxury brands in particular, these details matter.

At Red Ant Asia, we have extensive experience planning and executing China livestreams designed to build awareness and consideration, and deliver bottom-line impact without turning premium brands into QVC-style shopping channels driven by hard sales pitches and aggressive discounting.

We support brands across the entire process: from livestream strategy, platform selection and host casting to scriptwriting, set design, sales mechanics, paid media support and China livestreaming compliance.

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The Role of Livestreaming In China Marketing Campaigns

Livestreaming is Not an Awareness-Focused Marketing Activity but a Sales Channel

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If you are a marketer just arriving in China from Europe or the United States, one thing that may surprise you is that the tactical role of livestreaming events in Chinese marketing campaigns is typically not awareness- or consideration-building. In China, live videos are not a top-of-funnel experiment, a Q&A, or something the social team runs once a quarter and reports views on.

Livestreaming events in China are often e-commerce events that integrate with popular marketplaces such as Taobao and have clear commercial objectives and sales targets.

Whilst this doesn’t imply that every brand should be broadcasting daily or has to combine livestreaming with aggressive discounting, it does set the scene for the audience: Chinese netizens are not just dialling in for great storytelling; they are ready to pull the trigger.

China Livestreaming Driven E-Commerce Sales: Scale Is Not a Rounding Error

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Brands launched through our creative process.

Awards recognizing our branding excellence.

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According to the 2025 White Paper on the Development of the Chinese Live Streaming E-commerce Industry (Source), livestream e-commerce turnover surpassed RMB 5 trillion (US$742 bn) in 2025. That is close to a third of all online retail sales in the country, across a user base of 660 million Chinese netizens.

On Douyin alone, livestreaming drove roughly 36% of platform e-commerce GMV. Market research indicates that livestreaming contributes around 22% of all e-commerce sales in the middle kingdom.

The Brand Pivot: What Changed in Livestreaming in China in 2026

One of the biggest pivots in China livestreaming is the end of the so-called Mega-Host Era. Brand-owned channels are catching up with influencer-owned accounts.

For several years, the China livestreaming playbook was straightforward: buy a slot in a superstar’s live room, pay the pit fee, hand over the commission, take the GMV spike, put the screenshot in the quarterly deck. It worked, until the bubble burst. Singles' Day sales (Singles' Day is on November 11 and is one of the most popular e-commerce sales occasions in China) generated by popular livestreamer Austin Li, dubbed the “King of Lipstick” in China, cratered from roughly RMB 21.5 billion (US$$3.2bn) to just RMB 9.5 billion (US$$1.4bn) within a single year (Source). Other once-favoured livestreaming hosts have met a similar fate.

What sounds like a problem for brands in China has actually come as a blessing in disguise: instead of tying their fate to large-scale influencers, brands have started building their own livestreaming-focused social media accounts. This has enabled them to retain higher profits, collect customer data and grow their follower base. As a result, brand-generated livestreams on Douyin grew 113% year on year in 2025 (Source). As an experienced China livestreaming agency, we are able to support your livestreaming events either by working with successful creators in case you do not have the resources to nurture your own audience, or by helping you accelerate the impact of your own livestreaming accounts.

The Six Types of China Livestreaming — and Which One Your Brand Actually Needs

“Livestreaming” in China describes a set of formats with almost nothing in common beyond the fact that a camera is switched on. They differ in cost structure, staffing, brand risk, lead time and what they are actually good for. Here is a high-level overview.

Brand-Owned Livestreaming

As the name indicates, this approach aims at building your own social media audience via brand-operated, regular livestreams. Whilst the build-up may be slow, you retain full control over the audience and margins stay with you. On most Chinese social media platforms, algorithms reward consistency, so this approach requires commitment.

Creator-Led Livestreams

A KOL or KOC (KOL vs KOC in China) sells your product or service to their audience. The advantages are fast reach and borrowed credibility, but a cost structure that puts pressure on your P&L: creators often charge fixed upfront fees and, on top of that, collect a commission on all sales.

Store, Counter and Showroom Livestreams

For this approach, the camera enters a physical retail environment: a counter, a flagship or a showroom. Staff rather than professional hosts present products. With this format, production values drop but credibility rises. Whilst this can be a great format for luxury brands with elusive flagship stores, careful planning and meticulous execution are needed to preserve an exclusive, premium experience.

Buyer-Led Livestreaming (on Xiaohongshu)

Buyer-led livestreaming is a model made popular by Xiaohongshu (Xiaohongshu Marketing Services). For this format, a “buyer” curates a small selection of products for an audience that trusts their judgement and sells the products conversationally rather than in a promotion-driven manner (often at full price). Especially for premium and niche brands such as fine fragrance, skincare with a strong formulation story or a quiet-luxury fashion brand with a founder story, this approach can be a good fit.

Source-Origin Livestreaming

For this format, hosts trace brands back to their origins: broadcasts are streamed from locations where products are actually being made, grown or assembled. A distillery in Scotland or an atelier in Paris where design heads found their inspiration. The benefits of this approach to international premium brands are obvious: they can convey authenticity and true origin. Whilst this format is costly, it cannot easily be replicated by domestic Chinese brands that simply do not have hundreds of years of history or a design studio in a picturesque Italian town. Especially European heritage brands, which typically own precisely these assets, can heavily lean into this format and use it to effectively differentiate their brands.

Event, Launch and Destination Livestreams

Livestreams can be an effective way to broadcast exclusive events to larger audiences: runway shows, product launches, property tours, restaurant openings, anniversaries or press events. This format is particularly popular for destination brands: in China, hotels and destinations often sell packages and vouchers through livestreams on Douyin and other platforms. For travel and hospitality brands, this is often the highest-return livestream format available, and it bears almost no resemblance to product selling.

China Livestreaming Agency: Full-Scale Services

As an experienced China livestreaming agency, we manage every part of a livestream programme through one team.

Livestream Strategy, Platform Selection and Commercial Modelling

We start with the commercial objective and work backwards, because the platform decision follows from it rather than the other way round. This includes aligning on sales targets and developing strategies for price and margin protection. For e-commerce-focused livestreaming events, we model the likely economics before anything is committed: expected reach, realistic conversion, cost per broadcast hour, etc.

Account Setup, Qualifications and Cross-Border Paperwork

There are three routes into China’s live commerce: a mainland entity, a licensed local partner, or a cross-border store. Each carries different permissions, fee structures and restrictions, and cross-border requirements tightened considerably during 2026: dual verification of overseas production and circulation, registered trademarks rather than pending applications, certificates of origin, free-sale certificates, capped authorisation chains. We work with long-standing partners to assemble the documentation and secure verified status.

Host Casting and Training

The host is a critical variable in a livestream’s performance. We cast against the brief rather than the follower count: a dermatology-literate presenter for a serum with a real active, a fluent multilingual host for a fragrance house with a European story to tell. In general, the more genuine the host is and the more knowledgeable they are about your product or category, the better. We also brief hosts on your brand narrative and train them on your claims, your restricted language and your escalation rules.

Script, Offer Design and Running of Show

A three-hour broadcast is a structured piece of theatre with a commercial engine underneath. We build the run of show minute by minute: what opens, when the hero product appears, where the demonstrations sit, when stock is released, how the offer escalates, what happens in the flat spot ninety minutes in, when viewers start drifting. Alongside it, we build the claims library with approved language to describe your product or service.

Livestreaming Without Turning Your Brand into a Discount Channel

The unspoken fear among premium brands is not that livestreaming will fail. It is that it will succeed in the wrong way — that a strong first quarter of discounted volume will train Chinese consumers to wait for the next broadcast, and that eighteen months later the brand is worth less than the revenue it collected. As a China social media agency working with many respected luxury brands such as Charlotte Tilbury, Creed or Giuseppe Zanotti, we understand that for premium brands short-term gains can translate into long-term issues. For this reason we curate carefully planned livestream events that protect your brand value proposition whilst enabling you to achieve marketing and commercial targets.

The 2026 Legal Framework: Livestreaming is Now Considered Advertising in China

On 1 February 2026, the Supervision and Management Measures for Live Streaming E-commerce, issued jointly by the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Cyberspace Administration of China, came into force (Source). What sounds like a mouthful is one of the most consequential regulatory shifts in Chinese social media regulation in recent years.

What the new China livestreaming regulations essentially stipulate is that when an individual with a degree of public influence recommends a product during an e-commerce livestream, that now constitutes commercial advertising, and China’s Advertising Law applies in full. The implications of this go far beyond just basic transparency requirements that Western markets may be accustomed to: language and specific claims during the livestream are subject to strict regulation. This includes (just to list a few):
- Prohibited use of superlatives
- Prohibited use of unsubstantiated efficacy claims
- Limits on comparative performance statements

For an unscripted format delivered in real time, these restrictions can be difficult to administer. One wrong word can have serious legal consequences. As a result, brands need to monitor livestreaming sessions as they run, correct mistakes on air and retain recordings for three years. Hosts must complete formal training before their first broadcast and requalify every year. Where an AI avatar or AI-generated presenter appears, it must be labelled continuously as artificial, and liability for it sits with whoever operates the room. Also, legal liability does not stop with the host but also lies with the brand organising the event. A creator who overclaims on your behalf thus becomes your problem. Whilst none of the new legislation is a reason to avoid livestreaming in China, it further increases the need for careful planning and ample execution experience.

Why Global Brands Choose Red Ant Asia to Run Their China Livestreams

Livestreaming is a delicate matter for international brands. Whilst it can significantly boost sales performance, it also comes with risks: a host needs to be carefully selected and trained and legal guidelines need to be adhered to. As a specialist working with luxury and fashion, beauty and skincare, travel and hospitality brands we are uniquely positioned to provide you with an end-to-end livestreaming solution that preserves your brand equity whilst helping you achieve commercial goals.

One Team, One Line of Accountability

Strategy, casting, script, production, media and compliance sit under a single team in Shanghai, with English and French reporting into your regional and global stakeholders.

Kurator™ — Hosts and Creators Chosen on Evidence

Our proprietary creator database helps us identify hosts and partners. We assess audience composition, category authority, engagement quality, past commercial partnerships, conflicts and reputational exposure — not just follower count.

Compliance Built In, Not Bolted On

We are well familiar with the regulatory landscape that applies to livestreaming in China. We will manage everything from claims libraries, restricted-language lists, host training, live monitoring and record retention.

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