Digital Marketing Industry is constantly evolving and Programmatic Advertising is one of the latest trends to look for within the industry. Programmatic marketing is a way to target what types of audience one wish to show advertising to. Basically, programmatic media buying, marketing and advertising consist of algorithmic purchase and sale of advertising space in real time.
Let’s meet Grace Huang, a young, intuitive, and a highly ambitious woman entrepreneur with a never say no attitude in the world of digital advertising in China. She is the CEO and Co-Founder of iPinYou. With advance knowledge in big data technology and artificial intelligence, iPinYou has come to be known as the largest programmatic buying DSP provider in China and is one of the first companies bringing audience-targeted programmatic buying to brands in Asia. iPinYou also launched a Marketing Intelligence Platform (MIP) in 2017, an artificial intelligence decision platform, contributing its artificial intelligence knowledge to all brands.
Journey fostering Creativity and Innovation
Grace is a management graduate from UCLA Anderson School of Management, USA. She has had her stints with various industry giants like P&G as Marketer and at McKinsey as a Strategic Consultant.
With her passion and dedication, Grace always sought to create her own mark and pursue something significant in life which would make a difference in the industry and society at large. Eventually, in the pursuit of her dreams and the quest for discovering the right path embarked her on the journey of entrepreneurship in 2006 with the inception of iPinYou.
With her exceptional passion and astounding entrepreneurial skills Grace has positively handled all the challenges in the path, she says, “I encountered a lot of hurdles when I began with my startup, but I used to take up one challenge a day, think upon it and try and figure out the appropriate solution, this way, it always worked for me. However, the biggest challenge we faced as a company was educating the market, as we are the largest shareholder in the market (almost 60%).”
She since childhood has developed a never give up attitude; and leaves no stone unturned to overcome any challenge, she comes across. Grace and her team spared no efforts in educating the clients with the most meaningful and professional knowledge, also they closely involved them in innovative product development; which helped them a lot in winning the trust and praise of their clients and maintain the peak position in the market.
While describing her in a word, Grace believes she is a very logic-oriented person. Ever since childhood, she participated in a lot of math competitions and quizzes. She also loves playing Bridge, which helped her develop a mindset to put things in a logical framework and solve problems quickly.
Passion what Drives Grace
Grace is deeply influenced by the culture and literature she studied in her junior high school days. Along with that, there is a profound impact of old business leadership, its values and ethics on her. She says, “I am passionate about giving the best in whatever I do, which would create an enduring effect and carry long-lasting constructive values to the society.”
Grace is not a copy-paste person who follows other people; she rather has her own beliefs and likes to follow them. To try new things and nurture into an effective problem solving and critical thinking person has always been her passion.
Things that Shaped Her Life
Grace attributes her incredible success at iPinYou to the stints she has had in former organizations. She states, “Before embarking on the journey to entrepreneurship, my marketing role in P&G imparted a great deal of business sense in me. And later on, life at Mckinsey gave me a much-required CEO perspective. Here I got a chance to closely experience a very much different view of the business. For instance, it taught me how to identify the problem, how to define and solve it.”
She feels privileged to have such professional spells, which helped foster her career at iPinYou.
If you can dream it, you can do it!
“Every morning brings new hopes and opportunities to do something fruitful, to shine better than yesterday,” believes Grace. There are primarily two things that drive her to toil around 14-15 hours a day.
Firstly, the passion of becoming successful and generating value to people. And, second, most importantly, delivering trust to the employees, stakeholders and investors, who believed in her vision and dreams all along the journey.
While speaking on maintaining healthy work culture, Grace and her early teammates since the very beginning started to put down their words on culture and values for the company. They encourage and motivate their team not only monetarily but help them understand the importance of what they do is for this organization and ultimately clients.
Words of Wisdom for the Budding Entrepreneurs
Grace says, “My biggest advice to budding entrepreneurs is, always do something you really believe in from the heart.” She states that the trail to entrepreneurship is full of temptations which can off-track from your goals and muddled with a lot of pitfalls which can drive you crazy at times. So doing something really one believes in can off go the pains and the challenges. And another most important things is finding the right teammates while building the company, it’s similar to finding the right spouse! Thus, one has to be very careful about this.
The last advice Grace speaks, “Stay close to the market and customers. It’s very important to pick up the changes in the market to sustain in the competition.”
While talking about the future footsteps, Grace expressed, “Our AI based Marketing Intelligence Platform (MIP) is creating a stir in the market. I look forward that most of the big organizations in China in coming future will associate or adapt our platform for better business decisions and outcomes.”
Source: The 10 Best Performing Leaders to Watch
