Women to Watch Greater China 2022: Amber Liu, GroupM

Amber Liu

Principal partner of GroupM Circle
GroupM
Shanghai

Over the past 20 years, Amber Liu has built up a wealth of experience in the media and luxury industry working for agencies like Mindshare, Grey Group, Starcom, VivaKi and media outlets like Shanghai Times. During this time she has evolved to become an expert in media strategy development, brand marketing and operations.

It was when print media began to slow down and influencer marketing started to boom and flourish that Liu saw an opportunity for a breakthrough. Today she heads up Circle, a newly established business unit of GroupM that helps brands maximise the return on investment of influencer-marketing using celebrities and KOLs as the core.

Since 2020, Circle has been an outstanding success for Liu. Using the Celebrity Value Evaluation System (CVES), a proprietary big-data-driven model created by Liu that deploys more than 70 metrics to assess celebrity-brand affinity, Circle has handled more than 50 celebrity-endorsement deals for clients across 35 industries. It procures a 400% growth rate—surpassing a company-set KPI by 180%—and has led successful campaigns for leading brands including Aveeno, Dyson, Nike and Clear.

As a leader, Liu encourages her team to push new boundaries. Through finding people from different fields and backgrounds, she is skilled in pulling together a team with expertise in multiple fields, allowing her team to mutually learn and grow together. She encourages cross-functional collaboration with media planning teams to offer clients total solutions. The impact is tangible. The pitch for J&J Aveeno worked out closely by Circle and Essence, resulted in Circle becoming the preferred celebrity vendor and Essence as the preferred media vendor.

Liu has proven herself to be a genuine pioneer in todays' cluttered media environment. She has established an unprecedented guideline for the celebrity marketing industry, transforming the subjective ecosystem into a standardised business model. Coming up with a viable, industry-first business model to drive integrated and measurable celebrity marketing will surely continue to deliver significant value to the industry and clients.