On the morning of 11 April, the ‘18th National College Students Advertising Art Competition · Alibaba Cloud AI Creative Training Camp (Zhejiang University Station)’, organised by the Organising Committee of the National College Students Advertising Art Competition, hosted by the Zhejiang Regional Organising Committee of the competition, co-hosted by Alibaba Cloud, and organised by the School of Communication and International Culture at Zhejiang University, took place in Building 2 North on the Zijin Port Campus of Zhejiang University.
Building upon the “Cloud Engineering and Innovation” project under the University Support Programme, this training camp aims to help participating teachers and students gain a deeper understanding of cutting-edge applications of AI technology in advertising art, master new skills for advertising creation in the AI era, and utilise full-stack artificial intelligence services to help students stimulate innovative thinking and unleash boundless creativity.
Embracing the Technological Wave: Universities and Enterprises Join Forces to Cultivate Digital Creative Talent
At the start of the event, Zhang Yan, Head of the Department of Strategic Communication at the School of Communication and International Culture, Zhejiang University, and Chair of the Zhejiang Regional Organising Committee for the National College Students’ Advertising Art Competition, delivered the opening address. She spoke highly of the enthusiasm shown by the teachers and students present in embracing the wave of AI technology. Against the backdrop of AI comprehensively reshaping the creative industries, Zhang Yan emphasised that deepening university-industry collaboration has long been an essential requirement for cultivating creative talent in the digital age. The National College Students Advertising Art Competition is not merely a competitive arena, but also a solid bridge connecting cutting-edge creative technologies with higher education. In the future, the Zhejiang Regional Committee of the competition will continue to organise high-quality practical training activities and provide full support to participating teachers and students.
Guests in attendance included Li Qin from the Secretariat of the National College Students Advertising Art Competition Organising Committee, and Zhou Yijun, Secretary-General of the Beijing Regional Organising Committee of the Competition and Head of the Department of Advertising at the School of Fashion Communication, Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology.
Dispelling the Myth of Tools: Tens of Millions of Computing Power to Support ‘Spreading AI Through AI’
During the keynote session, Wang Luping, Design Director at Alibaba Cloud Design Centre, delivered a presentation titled ‘A New Paradigm for AIGC Design’. Drawing on landmark case studies such as the Winter Olympics and the Capital Library, he provided an in-depth analysis of cutting-edge explorations of AI in advertising creativity. Wang Luping pointed out that, in the face of the AIGC wave, creators should move beyond the mindset of “blindly piling on computing power to generate content” and instead focus on cultivating “precise control” over the generated output. He encouraged students to actively embrace the era of AI agents, build bespoke knowledge bases, and master workflows, thereby deeply integrating professional aesthetic judgement with full-stack AI tools.
Zhang Jing, an Alibaba Cloud Market Specialist and Head of University Partnerships for the National Competition, provided a detailed on-site explanation of the Alibaba Cloud-exclusive challenge and AI creative resources for the National Advertising and Public Relations Competition. She announced that this year, Alibaba Cloud is providing tens of millions of yuan in computing power subsidies for participating teachers and students, and has fully opened up its AI creative matrix based on the ‘Qianwen’ and ‘Wanxiang’ large language models. Addressing the theme “Qianwen Large Model – The Operating System of the AI Era”, Zhang Jing encouraged students to harness the core concept of “using AI to promote AI”. She urged them to utilise these tools to broaden the scope of their creations and accelerate their production, whilst infusing them with human warmth and emotion, thereby showcasing the boundless potential of AI technology to empower industries across the board.
Unveiling the Industrial-Grade Video Creation Pipeline: A Hands-On Demonstration of ‘Wan Jing Yi Ke’
To give teachers and students a first-hand experience of the appeal of AI-powered creation, Du Pu, Senior Product Manager at Alibaba Cloud Video Cloud, demonstrated the AI video and graphic design platform ‘Wan Jing Yi Ke’ to the audience. He explained that the platform leverages the capabilities of the Qianwen series of models to create an end-to-end, industrial-grade AI creation pipeline. Du Pu gave a detailed demonstration of the “video-to-video”, “image-to-video” and innovative “9-grid multi-parameter video generation” modes, showcasing the platform’s advanced capabilities in precisely controlling character positioning, synchronising audio and video, and camera movement.
Subsequently, Hu Jun, an experience design expert at the Alibaba Cloud Design Centre, drew on commercial case studies from well-known domestic beauty brands to break down the entire video production process—which relies on AI assistance for over 95% of the work—in real time. She pointed out that in AI-driven video creation, the generation of high-quality keyframes accounts for over 60% of the workload. Through a hands-on demonstration, Hu Jun illustrated the ‘subject + style + detail’ prompt formula and guided students and teachers through the workflow from character creation to voice matching, encouraging contestants to transform their imaginative ideas into high-quality finished videos cost-effectively and efficiently.
Breaking Down the Code Barrier: The Full-Stack Platform ‘Miao Wu’ Brings Inspiration to Life Instantly
At the event, Huang Yun, an AI Product Operations Specialist at Alibaba, gave a live demonstration of Alibaba Cloud’s full-stack cloud-based AI application development platform—‘Miao Wu’. The platform was created specifically to break down the ‘code barrier’ and ‘communication gap’ inherent in traditional development. Through its two core capabilities—'natural language dialogue' and 'reference image-based application generation'—even even teachers and students from the humanities with no technical background can build an AI application in a matter of minutes.
Alibaba Cloud Senior Experience Design Expert Tan Xiao, meanwhile, drew on practical UI interaction case studies to provide an in-depth analysis of the path to achieving high-quality design. He incisively pointed out: “The model determines the lower limit, engineering determines the boundaries, but it is the creator’s aesthetic sensibility and creativity that determine the upper limit of the work.” Tan Xiao encouraged participants to make good use of the platform’s advanced features, such as deep structured prompts, the integration of dedicated skill libraries, and one-click cloud deployment, to move beyond the mediocrity of AI-generated content and create innovative applications that combine visual appeal with business value.
During the open Q&A session, there was lively interaction and a vibrant atmosphere. Addressing practical creative challenges raised by students—such as ‘how to eliminate the artificial look in AI-generated videos’, ‘resolving issues with small text and garbled characters in footage’, and ‘debugging AI applications’—the team of experts provided detailed, actionable advice: make full use of the ‘multi-image reference’ blending feature and fine-tune the prompts; as for the issue of lengthy queuing times, this can be resolved by setting up a personal dedicated computing server. Furthermore, the experts engaged in accessible and insightful discussions with staff and students on topics such as mini-programme deployment, the distinctive advantages of various tools, and career development.
This training camp was not only a highly practical and informative professional workshop, but also effectively broke down the barriers to understanding AI tools among both teachers and students. ‘In the age of AI, it is the creator’s imagination and humanistic concern that are the core elements determining the calibre of a work.’ In the future, with the strong support of the Da Guang Competition platform and Alibaba Cloud’s full-stack AI technology, we are confident that more students from Zhejiang will soar to new heights in the realm of creativity, transforming boundless imagination into awe-inspiring works of our time.
