Alibaba.com Co‑Create 2023 Las Vegas Summit

Client Background

Alibaba.com, the global B2B e‑commerce platform under Alibaba Group, held its inaugural in‑person summit — Co‑Create 2023 — on September 7–8, 2023, at Resorts World Las Vegas. The event sold out weeks in advance, bringing together 82 industry experts across 52 sessions and attracting over 1,300 professional buyers from the US market. The summit served as the launchpad for a suite of new AI‑powered features, including the Smart Assistant for order tracking and opportunity discovery, an upgraded image search enabling simultaneous text‑and‑image queries, and real‑time translation across 17 languages for live video calls with suppliers.

Challenge

The brief arrived with fewer than four weeks to go — and a three‑week window to put Alibaba.com in front of professional buyers across US home goods, beauty, pet, and sports categories. The platform had a foothold in the market, but next to homegrown incumbents like Amazon Business and eBay, it was still playing away from home. The pressure wasn’t just about speed. The engagement had to convert — and converting B2B buyers is a different game entirely. Standard social media parameters like age, gender, and interest categories are built for consumers, not procurement managers. Uploading contact lists of phone numbers and emails to match against accounts on Facebook, X, or Google returned hit rates of just 5–7%. LinkedIn offered the sharpest B2B targeting available — but at CPMs five to ten times higher than competing platforms, the budget would be gone before meaningful reach was achieved.

Our Approach

The breakthrough hinged on one thing: getting the audience data right. We turned to Dun & Bradstreet — nearly two hundred years old and still the benchmark for B2B commercial intelligence in Western markets — for what social platforms couldn’t provide: verified professional data, filtered to match Alibaba.com’s core categories and scoped to purchasing managers and above. We encrypted the audience data, uploaded it to Facebook and Google, and let Lookalike modeling do the heavy lifting — extending reach to the right people, not just more people. On compliance, there were no shortcuts. All data processing and uploading was carried out by the US team, on US soil, with data never leaving American borders — fully aligned with CCPA and relevant regulations. The conversion funnel was nothing unusual: Facebook feed ad to Eventbrite registration page. What made it work wasn’t the path. It was the precision of who saw it, and when.

Execution Highlights

• 1. Leveraged Dun & Bradstreet’s B2B commercial database to filter target procurement audiences by industry category and seniority level
• 2. US‑based team managed all encrypted audience data processing and uploading end‑to‑end, with data remaining on American soil and handled in accordance with CCPA and applicable data protection regulations
• 3. Deployed Facebook and Google Lookalike modeling to scale precision reach beyond the seed audience
• 4. Drove registrations via Eventbrite landing pages, with continuous A/B testing across multiple creative and copy variants
• 5. Delivered full‑cycle project management for the Co‑Create 2023 Las Vegas summit within a three‑week sprint