"We want both efficiency and soul." When Fei Pan, chief executive officer of BlueFocus, delivers the line, it lands with the weight of a company that churned out half a million AI-generated videos last year and booked nearly RMB70bn in revenue. He is not being poetic. He is describing a production line.
In an exclusive interview with Campaign Asia, Pan fielded the industry's most uncomfortable questions without the usual corporate upholstery. No PR packaging, no cliché preparation. His replies carry the granular detail of a hands-on leader, and they land with force. He spends a great deal of time in conversation with AI, including an AI "lobster" he personally trained and nicknamed "Little Pan Pan". It is craftsmanship, one might say, from a man running China's largest marketing agency at a moment when marketing itself is being dismantled and reassembled by AI.
The aesthetic amplifier
The grunt work has already been surrendered. On BlueFocus's Xinying platform, product videos, subtitle scrubbing, lip-syncing across 29 languages, and ad performance feedback run entirely on AI. In 2025, the company logged 146 million agent-to-agent collaborative tasks. Humans set the rules and only intervene when data flags an anomaly. As Pan puts it: "Humans initiate the task, define the objective, and do the final calibration. AI pulls up the efficiency and quality of everything in between."
Unlike most peers, Pan refuses to draw a fixed border between silicon and carbon. He believes AI will eventually develop its own sense of taste. "Human aesthetic sensibility remains the rarest and most precious quality," he says, "but when models comprehend millennia of artistic accumulation, they will grow something like a 'preference'. Not emotion yet, but the embryo of taste." The path is fusion: injecting human taste into the technology, then using that technology to project the same taste onto a vastly larger canvas. "Be inside the AI, but keep your heart above it."
Carbon and silicon, cohabiting
The perennial debate about whether AI will replace humans is one Pan confronts without flinching. BlueFocus still employs several thousand people. "Roles centred on repetitive execution will, sooner or later, enter the replacement list." The company's stance has been codified into a rule as subtle as a brick: "No AI, No Bonus, No Promotion." Managers must be 30 to 50 percent fluent in the new tools. Some employees have expensed RMB300,000 in a single year on AI subscriptions, and Pan considers it money well spent.
The exercise, he insists, is additive, not subtractive. An agency stuffed with human account managers can only service so many clients. An augmented one can reach previously uneconomic markets. The vision is a "symbiosis of carbon and silicon", evoking not the dystopian chill of the Matrix but the harmony of a well-run factory. Humans become goal-setters and exception-handlers; the AI becomes the assembly line. Pan's definition of a "digital employee" demands five elements: identity, objectives, long-task collaboration, memory, and self-learning. Tick those boxes, and clients will not care whether the entity on the other end breathes or runs on GPUs.
Globalization's wild traffic
Pan's fixation on globalization began young. Buffeted by global culture, he felt a visceral urge to compete. "I want to prove that a Chinese company can stand at a genuinely high position in global marketing technology," he says. The numbers bear him out: over 80 percent of BlueFocus's revenue now comes from helping Chinese firms advertise abroad.
Underpinning the expansion is a "5-3-2" profit rule: half of profit from Meta, Google, TikTok; 30 percent from mid-tier media; 20 percent from proprietary technology and overseas offices. The logic is simple and, for those who fret about margin compression, a glimmer of hope. Overseas traffic is less of a walled garden than China's. Roughly 30 percent of digital inventory remains "wild", fragmented, and programmatic — exactly the soil in which MarTech companies have become capital-market darlings. BlueFocus is betting its combination of Chinese export clients and technical orchestration can harvest a similarly lucrative crop.
The physical expansion is accelerating: seven overseas offices last year, at least ten by the end of this one, from Southeast Asia to Latin America. Brazil is the bet Pan savours most, a market he expects to break through on both revenue and profit in 2026. "In cross-language, cross-culture, and cross-civilization contexts, this technology has natural advantages. I believe the first truly native business model will emerge in the globalisation track."
The planned Hong Kong IPO, he clarifies, is a means, not an end. The capital raised will fund the twin engines of AI and Globalization 2.0. "Our roots remain in China. Eighty percent of our business is tied to Chinese companies going overseas. But we must also be a genuinely global company, with local substance and our own traffic infrastructure."
The view from 2026
Ask Pan to reimagine the future, and he sketches a scene of mundane radicalism. A client dictates into a phone: "I want to build brand awareness among young people in Southeast Asia next week. Budget: RMB5 million." Within minutes, a full campaign — strategy, creative, placement, optimisation, reporting — has been assembled by autonomous agents, awaiting for approval. The ecosystem he foresees: the client's agent handles objectives, BlueFocus's agent layer executes, and the two negotiate directly. Humans intervene only at the apex.
The underlying logic of advertising will be rewritten. Today's agencies operate on an old chassis: brand pays, media distributes, and effectiveness is measured. But when systems understand user intent in real time and make choices on users' behalf, the boundary of "advertising" dissolves. Marketing becomes a continuous, intelligent, and responsive conversation. The battlefield for attention shifts from human eyeballs to the understanding, trust, and recommendation weighting of autonomous agents. "Agent-to-agent will become mainstream. Your assistant and the brand's assistant negotiate, decide, and execute directly. Humans step in only at the very top."
He gives BlueFocus a seven out of ten for readiness, a necessary margin of awe. "In this field, anyone who claims a perfect ten either doesn't understand it or is bluffing." The remaining three points are reserved for the speed of a world that will always move faster than any single company.