Roy Zhou

An MBA graduate of University of California, Berkeley’s prestigious Haas School of Business, Roy Zhou has been a major player in China’s digital advertising field for a decade and has played a key role in the development and adoption of programmatic in the market. He is a driving force in the push to create a more open digital landscape in China, and a firm believer in the power of big data to make sense of the fragmented media situation. Despite describing himself as “a typical tech guy”, those around him hail him as a strategic visionary. Zhou joined Yoyi as president in 2011, taking up the role of CEO the following year. He led the company to launch China’s first DSP that supported real-time buying in 2012, then in 2013 introduced the concept of multiscreen programmatic buying to the country. Founded in 2007, Yoyi aims to deliver the most effective data-driven digital advertising and empower its customers to reach their desired audiences at scale. The company is based in Beijing with regional centres in Shanghai and Guangzhou, with 500 employees. Prior to Yoyi, Zhou spent six years at Google, developing the internet giant’s advertising partnerships in Asia-Pacific and Japan out of Beijing. In three short years he quadrupled sales for Google’s AdSense in the region and extended its coverage to 80 per cent of internet users. He achieved this dramatic growth by observing the different nature of internet usage in the region: while it was largely information-based in the US, Chinese users were significantly more entertainment-centric. Zhou expanded AdSense services into video and gaming websites, and immediately saw a huge jump in partner signups. Before heading to the US for his MBA, Zhou spent four years as regional manager, North Asia, for 3Com, and three years as business development manager at Sun Microsystems.