Women to Watch Greater China 2023: Jackie Xu, Dentsu X

Jackie Xu

Head of experience design, China
Dentsu X
Shanghai 

As head of experience design at Dentsu X, Jackie Xu launched the Content Business Design (CBD) team in 2021 with a vision to bridge the gap between ‘experience’ and ‘exposure’. She set up this new team from scratch, attracting diverse talent from disciplines such as media, strategy, creative, digital, IP, gaming, entertainment and sports.

While working with key clients across different business units, Xu ensured that CBD’s expertise is incorporated in new pitches to deliver the beyond-media experience solution. This move proved to be a critical piece in Dentsu X’s experiential transformation in China; the synergistic excellence of the team contributed to 10% of the total revenue in the first year.

The commercial success of Xu’s team is just one of the many laurels that earn her a spot in this list. Dentsu China’s CEO Deric Wong calls her “a T-shaped leader who is both a generalist and a specialist”; the unique combination of depth, breadth of knowledge and skills make her an effective decision-maker. She uses that to draw from her experience to enhance the team’s skill sets, advance the agency’s product quality, while delivering significant business results, just some of the other attributes recognised by the judging panel. 

Xu’s work on the first OTT full-funnel solution for Sony Pictures to regain box office pull after the lull of Covid won her an MMA Gold and ROI Award Bronze. In 2021, the multi-level Nescafé campaign around China’s most played game (Honor of Kings) which involved building an IP to tap into the Gen Z audience turned out to be one of the best integrated campaigns of the year. It won her a Bronze at the Golden Mouse Award; later Dentsu X and Nestlé co-introduced the campaign at the effective creativity session at Cannes Festival. 

Xu sees herself not only as a team leader but an orchestrator of integration and radical collaboration with internal and external stakeholders. An advocate of the agency’s talent training plan, she launched the X5 Certificate Programme, an integrated online learning platform based on the five pillars of Dentsu’s transformational growth model, namely dX idea lab, dX insight, dX entertainment, dX commerce and dX transformation.

A firm believer in honing the next-gen talent, her involvement with the training platform is not just lip service: she regularly attends workshops, holds discussions and sessions to share experiences and insights. During the turbulent period of the 2022 Shanghai lockdowns, Xu initiated an online gathering of the wider industry colleagues to keep the collective creative spark alive. The agenda was to share, learn and lean into each other’s unique business stories and see a period of gloom as a time of opportunity.