About Meihua

Meihua

Meihua, published in Chinese as 梅花网 at meihua.info, is a Shanghai-based marketing and advertising industry media platform. Founded in 2003, it is one of China's longest-running specialist marketing media, built for the people who plan, buy, create and evaluate advertising rather than for a general news audience. It publishes advertising creativity, brand marketing cases, industry news and agency information, and it operates a large archive of Chinese and international advertising works that marketers and agencies use for research and benchmarking. Based in Shanghai, China's advertising industry centre, Meihua also runs industry events and awards coverage, combining a daily trade publication with the reference tools of an advertising information service.

Founding and identity

Meihua was founded in 2003, in the period when China's advertising market was expanding rapidly and when professional information about that market was still largely held inside agencies and media owners. The name behind the platform is Meihua Information — Shanghai Meihua Information Co., Ltd. — a company that describes its wider role in marketing systems and information. In its English-language coverage as early as 2008, Advertising Age described Meihua as providing marketing systems and information in China to help connect media agencies, media owners and advertisers with timely and reliable media rates and data. That description captures the dual character Meihua has kept ever since: it is a publisher of marketing news and creative work, and it is also an information provider whose value lies in structured data about advertising itself.

The platform's own long-standing positioning, visible in its advertising monitoring product material, was as an information centre for Chinese marketers. That positioning explains why Meihua did not develop as a consumer magazine about famous brands. Its readers are practitioners — brand managers, media planners, creative staff and agency managers — who need to see what competitors have run, where they ran it, and what work is currently setting the standard in their category.

The advertising works archive

The archive is the core of Meihua's editorial offer. The site collects Chinese and international advertising works so that users can search and compare creative output across brands, categories and media. For a creative team preparing a pitch, or a marketer reviewing how a category has been advertised over time, a searchable archive of actual work is more useful than commentary alone. Meihua's archive serves that research and benchmarking function: readers can study how a problem was solved by another brand, how a competitor presented a product, or how international work handled a brief similar to their own.

This archival role is closely connected to Meihua's advertising monitoring service. The company's product material explains that the monitoring service grew out of a predecessor described as a national advertising database, created in 2002, and that its coverage expanded from newspapers and magazines at the start to a cross-media service covering print, television, online, outdoor and promotional media. The same material says Meihua was the first enterprise in the Chinese market to provide this kind of information and consulting service through an internet data platform. In other words, the habit of collecting, storing and making advertising searchable predates and underpins the public-facing website that readers know today.

Advertising monitoring and media data

Meihua's advertising monitoring was designed to give marketers a clear view of competitive brands' marketing strategies. Its product sheet recorded coverage of more than 500 newspapers and magazines, around 100 television channels, 250 websites and mainstream outdoor media in 20 first- and second-tier cities, with a dedicated media research team continually revising and expanding that monitoring range. Those figures belong to that product documentation and illustrate the scale the service aimed at when print and television still dominated Chinese advertising budgets.

The service also preserved the creative itself. For every advertisement it monitored, Meihua recorded the creative content: newspaper and magazine advertisements as high-precision JPEG files, television advertisements as MPEG video, online advertisements in their original creative files, and outdoor advertisements as photographs taken on site. Users could search by fuzzy keyword, brand name, advertiser name, product name or product model, and save any search as a personal monitoring item for long-term tracking. The product material said more than 4,000 marketing professionals were using the service daily and that it had been adopted by the marketing departments of more than 250 enterprises. Used this way, Meihua was not simply reporting the advertising industry — it was supplying part of the industry's working infrastructure.

MediaSearch and the Nielsen partnership

Meihua's standing outside China was visible in 2008, when Nielsen Company partnered with Meihua Information to launch MediaSearch, at mediasearch.cn, as a media rates and data source for China. Advertising Age reported that MediaSearch worked with more than 5,300 vendors, including traditional media such as magazines, newspapers, television and radio, as well as online and direct marketing operators, and that it provided links to media websites, online media kits, audit statements and programming schedules. The service was offered free of charge, with the aim of connecting media agencies, media owners and advertisers with timely and reliable media rates and data.

Announcing the partnership, Bernard Hughes, Nielsen Media's executive director for China, based in Shanghai, pointed to the proliferation of media and a fast-changing and increasingly diverse media landscape in China as presenting both opportunities and challenges to media players and marketers pursuing an effective strategy. The partnership is a useful marker in Meihua's history: by 2008, a global measurement company treated Meihua's Chinese media information as a foundation worth building a joint service on.

Marketing news, cases and agency information

Alongside the archive and the data services, Meihua publishes the ordinary material of a trade title: advertising creativity, brand marketing cases, industry news and agency information. Case coverage matters in Chinese marketing because practitioners learn the trade substantially through worked examples — what a brand did, through which channels, and with what creative idea. By presenting cases next to a searchable archive of the underlying work, Meihua lets a reader move from a news story about a campaign to the campaign itself, and then to comparable work by competitors or by agencies in other markets.

Agency information serves a practical business purpose as well. Brands choosing a partner, and agencies positioning themselves against rivals, both need a public record of who did which work. A platform that hosts the work, reports the industry news around it and lists agency information becomes a place where reputations in the Chinese advertising business are made visible and can be checked.

The Meihua Innovation Awards — Mawards

Meihua's best-known event property is the Meihua Innovation Award, known as Mawards. According to the handbook for the tenth edition in 2022, the award was created in 2013 and belongs to Shanghai Meihua Information Co., Ltd. It is positioned around marketing innovation, is held annually, and by 2022 had been held successfully for nine editions, with the tenth edition following that year. Its stated purpose is to honour institutions and individuals for innovative practice in marketing during the year, and to advocate the efforts and experiments that marketing innovation involves.

The 2022 structure shows how broadly Meihua defines that innovation. The tenth edition comprised single awards, industry awards and annual grand awards. Its twelve single awards included best content marketing, best event marketing, best integrated marketing, best social media marketing, best influencer marketing, best e-commerce marketing, best film and entertainment marketing, best performance marketing and best mobile marketing. The annual grand awards covered the advertising work of the year and the advertising agency of the year. Winning work could be preserved permanently on Meihua, for display and dissemination — which ties the awards directly back to the archive that is the platform's foundation, turning a year's honoured campaigns into part of the permanent record other marketers can study.

Research and the Meihua research centre

Meihua has also presented itself as a research provider. Its media research centre, described in the company's own research material as a direct service institution of Meihua Information, specialised in media market industry research and consulting, advertising media product value evaluation, advertising effectiveness research and audience research, serving companies both upstream and downstream in the communications industry. The centre said it integrated existing professional resources in the industry and worked with partner institutions in different specialist fields, drawing also on the expert network Meihua had accumulated over years of work in the communications business.

That research strand fits the rest of the business. A company that monitors advertising, holds media rate information and publishes industry news is well placed to survey the industry it serves — for example, questioning the managers responsible for corporate media placement about how advertisers choose media and how their behaviour is changing. Meihua's research publications did exactly that kind of advertiser-behaviour work, using its registered membership as a route to the marketing managers whose decisions it set out to understand.

Shanghai base and audience

Meihua is based in Shanghai, the city listed for it in the directory record and the centre of China's advertising industry, where multinational agency networks, major domestic agencies, media owners and brand headquarters cluster. A Shanghai base put Meihua close to the agencies whose work it archives, the media owners whose rates it listed, and the marketers who used its monitoring service. Its audience is correspondingly professional and national rather than local: the site is not a Shanghai city news service, but a national trade platform that happens to be headquartered where much of its industry sits.

The language of the platform underlines that focus. Meihua publishes in Chinese for Chinese marketing practitioners, while its archive deliberately includes international advertising work, giving domestic readers a window on creative standards abroad and giving the Chinese work it collects a context in which it can be compared.

Standing and significance

Meihua's significance is that it has lasted. Founded in 2003, it is described in the directory record as one of China's longest-running specialist marketing media, in a sector where marketing websites have frequently appeared and disappeared with advertising cycles and platform shifts. Its durability rests on the combination it built early: a searchable archive of advertising work, monitoring and media data services that practitioners used in their daily work, trade news and case publishing, a research centre, and, from 2013, an annual innovation award whose winning work feeds back into the archive.

For readers outside China, Meihua is also a practical research tool. Its pages and its archive record, in Chinese, how brands have actually advertised in the world's second-largest advertising market — the creative work itself, not just commentary about it. For the Chinese marketers who are its primary audience, it remains what its early product material called it: an information centre for the profession, based in Shanghai and published at meihua.info.