China’s Seven Departments Target 10 Globally Competitive Ad Firms by 2030

Beijing's push to build a handful of globally competitive ad groups signals a shift from fragmented, platform-driven ad spending toward consolidation under state-guided industrial policy. The explicit endorsement of M&A and group structures matters most for mid-sized agencies and ad-tech vendors, which could be absorbed into larger entities or pushed into supplier roles. The open question is whether consolidation yields genuine international competitiveness or mainly domestic scale, and how much room smaller independent players retain as coordination runs through leading firms' platforms.