Pinduoduo's three-layer ad system: creative is the new targeting
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
Scrolling Facebook last night, a Pinduoduo ad caught my eye.
Not because of the product, but because the ad wasn't posted by Pinduoduo's official account. It was run by a third-party Facebook page.
I later talked to a few friends in digital marketing, and realised there's probably a textbook-level digital marketing strategy behind it.
A three-layer ad system
After looking closely, I think Pinduoduo is running a three-layer ad system this time.
Layer one is the official account.
Everyone gets this one: introducing Pinduoduo's arrival in Malaysia, new-user vouchers, free shipping. Its job is to build brand awareness.
Layer two is a huge number of marketing accounts.
Not one, but many different personas, different Facebook pages, different AI-generated pretty faces, different content formats, all saying the same thing: download Pinduoduo.
Layer three is KOLs and creators.
Real content creators join in too, packaging the ads to look more like genuine sharing than brand advertising.
I then wondered: why not run everything from the official account?
The answer may be simple.
The official account looks after the brand image, but what really drives conversion is a large number of different creatives.
A pretty face attracts one group, a housewife attracts another, a KOL attracts yet another. Local backgrounds, different languages, different openings: all of them are testing different audiences.
Creative has become the new targeting
This is the part I find most interesting.
When we ran Meta ads in the past, we were always studying targeting.
Interests, age, region, lookalike audiences...
But today, as Meta's algorithm gets smarter and smarter, the creative itself has become the new targeting.
Rather than guessing which group will download, you make hundreds of versions of an ad at once and let Meta find the answer.
So they're not looking for the best ad.
They're looking for the ads that most easily get different users to download the app.
And AI amplifies this completely.
Testing a hundred ads used to mean a hundred shoots, a hundred models, a hundred edits.
Now, one script can become an AI-model version, a Malaysian-background version, an English version and a Chinese version within minutes, then be tested at scale alongside real creators and KOLs.
Costs keep falling while testing gets faster and faster.
An app install war
Why is Pinduoduo's approach this time so different from before?
When TikTok Shop entered the market, it was almost all done through official accounts.
Telling everyone:
TikTok Shop is live; you can now buy directly on TikTok.
The focus was building trust in the platform.
Later, Temu's most famous campaign in the US was "Shop Like a Billionaire".
It used a single brand message and a huge budget to make the world remember Temu.
But this time, arriving in Malaysia, Pinduoduo didn't follow that brand playbook.
It looks more like it's fighting an app install war.
Brand ads continue, but the real budget is probably going into hundreds of different creatives, personas and creators, letting Meta keep optimising to find the combinations with the lowest cost per install.
Looking at PDD Holdings' financials, this isn't too surprising.
In 2025 alone, its sales and marketing expenses exceeded RMB 125 billion, and in the first quarter of 2026 they were close to RMB 33.8 billion.
For them, advertising is no longer about running a campaign.
It's a data system that runs continuously.
We used to think ads were about spreading a brand. Today, they look more and more like training an algorithm.
PDD's focus is no longer shooting the single best ad, but finding fastest which ad, which persona and which content most easily gets users to download the app.
To me, that is AI's biggest change to digital marketing.
Testing a hundred ads used to be almost impossible.
Now AI can generate hundreds of versions in a day, at a cost low enough for almost unlimited testing, then hand them to the algorithm to keep optimising.
What Pinduoduo showed me this time isn't just an ad. It's a new way of thinking about marketing.
Future competition may no longer be about who shoots the best ad. It's about who can produce content fastest, test fastest, learn fastest, and keep repeating that loop.
I think that's more worth studying than the ad itself.