Having been rooted in the advertising industry for nearly 20 years, the footprint of 360 Group Vice-President Willy Yang Jiongwei is to follow the changing times and his pursuit of technology.

"I did not consider too much at those points, but it is found that everything happened for a reason when I look back," he says.

Back in 2000, before the burst of the information technology bubble, dot-com companies, whose businesses were mainly through websites using the popular top-level domain ".com", sprang up like mushrooms, thanks to the birth of World Wide Web.

Many of them said they have caught the audience's eyes and then would sell advertisements to earn money.

Yang witnessed the internet boom during his college life at Fudan University in Shanghai, majoring in computer software. He hoped to grab the chance, but in a different way that can reap his advantage in computer technology.

"When others are digging it up from mines, I decide to give them water," says Yang, using the metaphor.

He joined the founding of China's largest digital marketing agency Allyes as president and being responsible for technology research and business development.

Allyes used to sell advertising technology software to dot-com companies. But, with the dot-com crash, these companies could not afford Allyes' products. It forced Allyes to transform the business into an advertising agency, oriented to meeting clients' needs.

"It's a pity that the transformation hindered Allyes' advancement in advertising technology," says Yang, feeling sorry as a believer in technology.

With the emergence of the new economy led by e-commerce in 2007, he saw the effect of advertisement being evaluated and the role of technology becoming more and more important.

Aiming to rebuild an advertising platform, Yang decided to do it himself and founded a digital commercial technology startup - MediaV Advertising - in 2009. The startup grew rapidly and had accumulated some 30,000 clients in four years.

But the founder also noticed its challenge - the huge investment. The majority profits of the startup were used on its 100 engineers, but the number of clients and the amount of data did not catch up with the expenses.

While its strengths and needs matched perfectly with 360 Group which owns lots of clients and vast data but is poor in the technology of display advertising. The two complemented each other and, finally, Yang joined 360 in 2014 with his startup merging into the major company.

edithlu@chinadailyhk.com

(HK Edition 01/04/2019 page10)