Five Chinese firms now rank among the world's 10 biggest ad sellers, a sign of how commerce platforms have displaced traditional media in advertising, according to a WPP ranking for 2025. US giants Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft share the list with Alibaba, Temu parent PDD, JD.com, TikTok owner ByteDance, WeChat owner Tencent, and video service Kuaishou, with no media companies making the cut after the category was once dominated by Western newspapers, magazines, and TV. Retailers have copied Amazon by spinning up ad businesses on their own sites, with global retail-media spending jumping from $73B in 2020 to $175.7B last year and projected to reach $265.6B by 2030. China is the biggest retail-media market at $77.6B, though growth has slowed as social-commerce sites like TikTok Shop pull spending away.
