What ChinaJoy 2026 Revealed About UA, CTV and Retention

ChinaJoy 2026 wrapped up with three packed days in Shanghai, one of mobile gaming and marketing's biggest stages. Our team spent the show at booth W4-E101, meeting longtime partners, catching up with familiar faces, and connecting with new ones across the mobile marketing community. 

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The next growth conversation at ChinaJoy

Across our time at ChinaJoy, attracting high-value users was still one of the main priorities for the advertisers we spoke with, enough so that many were actively scouting untapped inventory and new channels to add more acquisition touchpoints to their mix. At the same time, retention came up just as often: a growing number of teams were turning to retargeting specifically as the mechanism to hold on to that new growth once it landed.

“What stood out to me this year was that the conversations at our booth were no longer just about acquiring more new users. People were increasingly exploring new traffic opportunities, such as CTV inventory, as well as how to re-engage existing users whose value has already been proven through retargeting. These two areas are gradually becoming increasingly important topics in app marketing, reflecting a broader shift in the industry from simply acquiring more users to unlocking more value from the users we already have.” – Klaus Cui, General Manager, China at Affle. 

That balance —new channels to expand reach, App Retargeting to protect the value already earned— is what's now defining sustainable growth in mobile. Advertisers who understood this treat both solutions as two halves of the same strategy, each making the other work harder. Nowhere did that balance show up more clearly than in conversations about CTV. Here's why it kept coming up.

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CTV: the piece completing the growth mix

CTV came up constantly, and not as a replacement for mobile, but as a complement that makes the whole growth mix stronger. A few reasons why:

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A new acquisition touchpoint beyond mobile

CTV reaches consumers in a fundamentally different context than mobile. Rather than competing for attention amid scrolling and juggling multiple apps, CTV meets consumers in a lean-back viewing mindset, giving each ad a level of focused attention that's harder to come by on mobile. 

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Real-time results via your preferred MMP

Installs and conversions that happen on mobile after a consumer sees a CTV ad can be tracked with the same rigor as any other performance channel. Through integrations with leading MMPs, those mobile actions can be attributed efficiently back to the CTV exposure that drove them. With Jampp CTV, advertisers also get real-time visibility into results through a live dashboard so they can monitor performance at all times.

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Co-viewing multiplies reach

A mobile impression reaches one user. A CTV impression can potentially reach an entire household at once, turning a single ad placement into a shared discovery moment, and making every dollar spent work harder.

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More time to actually land the story

CTV completion rates consistently run high, with industry benchmarks typically putting them in the 90–97% range. For advertisers, that translates into real creative room: enough time to walk through a product experience, a core feature, a moment of gameplay, an unboxing, or any other detail that best captures the value proposition.

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A stronger mix, not a bigger funnel

CTV and mobile work best when they run in parallel, not as sequential stages in a funnel. Each reaches consumers in a different context (CTV on the big screen, mobile in the moment of action) and together they widen where and how consumers first encounter a product, while still optimizing toward the same performance goal.

Benjamin Waters, VP APAC at Jampp, sees this cross-screen thinking as the shift the industry now needs to make

“The industry must move beyond planning for individual screens and start planning for consumer journeys. This is especially relevant for China advertisers reaching users overseas, where CTV is quickly becoming one of the fastest-growing performance channels, one that delivers incremental scale and high completion rates across premium inventory. With consumers moving between CTV and mobile, the opportunity today lies in making every touchpoint accountable to a conversion outcome to prove the real impact of your marketing efforts.” – Benjamin Waters, VP APAC at Jampp.

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The Takeaway from ChinaJoy 2026

Across our conversations at booth W4-E101, the same combination kept surfacing: acquisition that keeps expanding into new channels, App Retargeting that protects the value already earned, and CTV emerging as the clearest performance opportunity to test in 2026—reaching consumers in a new context, attributing back to mobile with precision, and giving creative the room to actually land. 

All in all, being back at ChinaJoy for another year was a reminder of why this show remains a fixture on our calendar. Same city, same show floor, but a noticeably more sophisticated set of questions—a sign of an industry maturing faster every year.

Want to keep the conversation going?

Catch Jampp at our upcoming events or contact us to see how UA, App Retargeting, and CTV come together in practice. 

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