Women to Watch Greater China 2022: Mandy Hou, MediaCom

Mandy Hou

Chief digital officer
MediaCom China
Shanghai

After earning her MBA in marketing, Mandy Hou began her career working for a China ecommerce startup. However, when the opportunity knocked, Hou moved to a media agency and put the entrepreneurial spirit she learnt to good use. She hasn't looked back since. Recognised for her drive to push innovative solutions for her clients, at the age of 28, Hou was tasked to lead the company’s national performance practice including search, programmatic, and ecommerce.

Today, Hou is chief digital officer at MediaCom China and has been in that role for one year – a year in which she has driven a profound transformation, with a combination of data, commerce, social and content. With a keen appetite for new business, Hou continues to play a key leadership role in media pitches. She was instrumental in securing blue-chip clients and most recently the unprecedented WPP Coca Cola win.

At the beginning of 2021, many Chinese advertisers made owned sales channel development a key priority. Under Hou's leadership and with an intentional plan, MediaCom helped multiple clients significantly increase their sales share from owned channels, sometimes from scratch.

For a leading luxury client, her MediaCom team delivered doubled sales through a WeChat mini-program, accumulating more than 100 million high value first-party data points for the client, tested hundreds of tags and identified new business opportunities. Furthermore, Hou and her team delivered close to a 30% ROI increase for a major sports brand during this year’s highly-competitive 11.11 sales festival, using dynamic creative against key segments helped by live data seeding on Tencent.

Hou also has that rare quality of being able to understand the complexity of cutting-edge new technology and distilling it into a solution for her clients’ business challenges. At MediaCom, she leads the charge in building best data usage practices with growing platforms like Douyin. Hou is also extremely passionate about new data solutions and has presented at many industry workshops and conferences.

Leading a team of almost 100 team members, Hou encourages them to think out of the box and organises monthly internal workshops to mentor and foster creativity in her team. She actively builds and maintains relationships with industry experts to expose her team to best practices.

In the 12 short months since joining MediaCom China, Hou has been at the forefront of developing new solutions and initiatives for clients, as well as product and new business development, resulting in major new business wins. This is testament to her unique ability to bring her entrepreneurial spirit into larger corporations, continuing to innovate at high speed and helping her team achieve extraordinary results.