The finance director's question I could not answer

In the spring of 2012 I presented a campaign review to the finance director of Qingtaoyuan Beverages. The agency report claimed that our outdoor screens had delivered eleven million impressions across Hangzhou. She asked one question: how many more bottles had we sold where the screens ran than where they did not? I had no answer, and the following year's budget for that channel was halved. Much of my career since then has been an attempt to ensure that the advertisers who buy from me never stand in that room without an answer.

I studied economics with a statistics major at Moqingshan Institute of Economics, graduating in July 2000. My first employer was Weixunda Consumer Research in Shanghai, where I drafted questionnaires, supervised street-intercept fieldwork and wrote the weighting notes behind brand-tracking reports. The lesson of those years was humbling. A sample that looked large could still overrepresent the people who were easiest to reach, and a confident percentage could rest on a fragile assumption. I learnt to put the limitations of a study at the top of a report rather than in its appendix.

In 2005 I moved to Gaolianshu Media Planning, an independent agency, as a planner for food and household brands. I built television and outdoor schedules, negotiated with station sales teams and, increasingly, with the early screen operators appearing in office buildings. Their audience claims were often generous. By 2010 I was an associate director responsible for eight client accounts, and I wanted to know what it felt like to spend the money rather than recommend it.

Qingtaoyuan, a family-owned maker of bottled tea and plant drinks, gave me that experience. As brand and media manager, and later head of brand marketing, I managed a media budget that peaked at RMB58 million. After the finance director's question, I began running simple regional comparisons: a campaign in some prefectures, none in similar ones, and sales compared through distributor shipments. The comparisons were imperfect, but they changed the conversation about which channels deserved a place in the plan.

Xiaruntang recruited me in December 2015 to lead audience research and pricing. The company had grown out of Hexiaolan's property-management business, placing screens first in buildings its sister company managed and later in thousands of third-party compounds and offices. Its audience figures relied on survey estimates and occupancy data supplied by landlords. I rebuilt the estimates with documented assumptions, shared their weaknesses with agencies and replaced a single rate per screen with tiers by building grade and screen position.

I became vice-president of marketing in July 2019 and Chief Marketing Officer in April 2022. The pandemic years tested every assumption about lobby footfall. Offices emptied for weeks at a time in Shanghai, while residential entrance halls became the place where families collected groceries and parcels. Our residential inventory grew in importance, and with it our responsibility to the people who walked past those screens twice a day without choosing to look at them.

As CMO I work most closely with the chief commercial officer, who owns sales, and with legal counsel, who owns legal conclusions. My role is to decide how we describe our audience, how we price and package it, which advertising we accept and how we explain ourselves to the property managers whose walls we use. Those boundaries matter. A sales team under pressure will sometimes want marketing to say more about an audience than the evidence supports, and counsel will sometimes need marketing to set out a commercial consequence before giving advice.

I lead through written evidence. When we change a price or a category rule, I circulate the analysis and its weaknesses before the meeting and ask the colleague most likely to disagree to respond first. Haoyu Rong, our chief commercial officer, argued against two of the three decisions described on this site. The decisions improved because he did, and one of his objections about lost business in 2024 was partly right.

I have presented to Xiaruntang's board on pricing, partner terms and personal-information matters, and since 2023 I have reported quarterly to its risk and compliance committee. I have never held a directorship. An independent seat would ask me to judge a company I do not run, from papers prepared by others. I would want that responsibility on a board that needs someone able to test marketing claims and that treats its customers' privacy as part of the brand rather than an obstacle to it.

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