Our bi-lingual China team at MiQ has a passion for programmatic but who are the people working hard for our clients? We’ve placed the spotlight on our great team members, Jerry Li, Simin Zheng, Jia-Long Ye and Sihan Ding.
Let’s start by meeting Jia-Long.
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As a China programmatic expert, I support our global clients in expanding their business in China. I lead a team of specialist bi-lingual traders and ad operations executives based in London. We’re responsible for managing and optimising campaigns in China using our purpose-built Chinese programmatic tech stack, enabling our clients to run programmatic in China from the UK, or anywhere in the world for that matter!
Being second generation Chinese, I naturally have a strong connection with China. But my path to working on the China team at MiQ wasn’t a linear one.
My background
Both my parents emigrated from Qingtian, Zhejiang province in the 1980s to Austria, where I grew up. I travelled back and forth to China in my youth but when I turned 18, I relocated to the UK to study Business and Economics of Contemporary China at the University of Nottingham.
With an interest in the business world and my culture, I was able to study abroad at the Ningbo campus in east China’s Zhejiang province. During this time, I worked as a summer audit intern at PWC, giving me experience and insight into Chinese business culture.
My job search led me to MiQ in Germany. I didn’t have a background in programmatic, but it seemed like a fascinating and growing industry. I moved from Austria and joined the company as a trader, responsible for operating MiQ’s pan-European programmatic campaigns for our clients in the DACH region.
As a trader, I set up campaigns, optimised in programmatic platforms and derived trends for insight reports and QBRs. I also supported our clients so they understood how I was managing their campaign to drive results. This was my favorite part of the role, sharing, collaborating, and ideating with clients.
I became fluent in the world of programmatic to deliver campaign success and real world business outcomes for clients across Europe. In 2018, Lee Puri, MiQ’s co-founder, asked me to conduct research on the viability of launching MiQ in the Chinese market. I worked in both roles until I made the switch to the China team fully in 2019.
Joining the China team
Joining the China team at an early stage gave me the chance to bring my academic, programmatic know-how, and cultural background together in one of the largest and fastest growing markets in the world.
We developed our own unique approach to programmatic in China (take a look here to find out more), one necessitated by the unique and interesting nature of the ecosystem. We use our Chinese platforms to buy inventory from display through to CTV, across some of the largest mobile-apps in the world. And source local data from the likes of Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent for custom audience targeting – it’s great to have this and our broader Chinese programmatic tech stack at our fingertips when running campaigns in China.
It didn’t take long before we launched our first China campaigns with our UK based clients. I re-sized creatives, uploaded advertiser docs and trafficked assets into our platforms, built custom audiences in our DMPs, setup targeting line items in our DSPs and built reporting infrastructure to feedback to our clients results on an ongoing basis. It was end-to-end work that finished with me delivering MiQ’s first impression in China.
Very quickly we saw success, with our China business reporting the fastest six-month growth MiQ had seen from any new market. I moved to London, which serves as our central China hub for servicing our European based clients. Unfortunately, our early excitement was subdued by the onset of COVID-19. The pandemic brought an abrupt end to travel and education verticals, which formed a large part of our China demand at that time. Other sectors were affected for the next year.
Bouncing back
In Q4 2020, things changed and we turned a corner. Our China team has more than doubled in size since and our client-base is up 400% year-on-year, thanks to our significant product improvements and growth of the programmatic industry in China.
We have built proprietary technology around each of our Chinese platforms for aggregated data ingestion, central campaign management and holistic reporting and insights. We improved the depth of programmatic capabilities with more product and inventory partnerships. We also have taken proactive measures to be compliant with China’s new data privacy law; Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) ahead of its enactment on November 1st this year.
Today, not only do I manage campaigns but I also lead a team of traders and ad operations executives, helping them to deliver success in China for our clients. I am also influential in putting forward use-cases from our clients to expand upon our product solution and Chinese programmatic tech stack.
China is an innovative market and presents unprecedented opportunities for our clients. I am pleased to bring the Chinese audience closer to our clients in the UK and to work at a business that’s expanding in China, a place that has shaped my past and will undoubtedly impact my future. Bring it on.
有志者，事竟成 – Where there’s a will, there’s a way!
Find out how Jia-Long can help your brand reach Chinese audiences here.
