About AdMaster

AdMaster

AdMaster, operated by Jing Shuo Technology (Jing Shuo Keji), is a Beijing-headquartered independent third-party digital marketing data company. Founded in 2006 by Vincent Yan, also known as Yan Zhao, it described itself as China's largest independent third-party data management platform (DMP) and as the independent measurement partner of more than 80 percent of leading brands in China, including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, BMW and McDonald's. From offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, AdMaster built a business around a simple proposition for the fast-growing Chinese digital advertising market: that brands needed data they could trust, collected and analysed by a party with no media to sell.

Founding and company profile

AdMaster was founded in 2006. Its founder and chief executive, Vincent Yan, was 34 years old when the company announced its acquisition of JinShuJu in November 2015, nine years after he had founded the business. The company grew to operate in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, with two research and development centres in Beijing and Shanghai, and employed about 201 people as of 2016 according to PitchBook records. Its stated mission evolved over time: initially to help brands monitor social opinion and provide social data assessment and insight mining, and later, in the words of its president Maggie Wang, to become an artificial-intelligence-driven social and insight solutions provider, using real-time, accurate and multidimensional data from social media and other sources together with AI technology and proven algorithms and models.

Data platform and scale

AdMaster's platform was built for volume. The company said it operated the largest server cluster of its kind in China, processing more than 200 billion data records a month and iterating over more than 100 data models. Its services were delivered through a software-as-a-service platform, turning what it called big data into 'smart data' that businesses could use to make more informed decisions. Core services covered third-party digital advertising verification, social media and e-commerce measurement, and data management, including data obtained from personal computers and mobile devices.

That infrastructure supported the company's claim to be China's largest independent third-party DMP. In a market where the biggest platforms controlled both media inventory and the data describing its performance, AdMaster's independence was its central commercial argument: advertisers could use its monitoring to check the effectiveness of spending placed elsewhere.

Advertising effectiveness monitoring

The company's original core service was digital marketing effectiveness monitoring: measuring whether advertising was delivered as planned and what it achieved. Its offering covered advertising effectiveness monitoring, cross-screen reach analysis — following audiences as viewing spread across personal computers, mobile devices and connected screens — and the optimisation work that followed from those measurements, with the goal of improving overall marketing return on investment. AdMaster worked directly with the China Advertising Association and MMA China on the formulation of a series of standards for digital advertising, intended to help regulate and bring transparency to China's digital marketing market.

Social and insight analytics

With the rise of Weibo and the launch of WeChat, Chinese consumers became heavily dependent on social platforms for communication and information, and AdMaster built a substantial social data business in response. Its Social & Insight Analytics (SIA) line provided social media monitoring and insight, combining large-scale social data collection with analysis to identify trends and inform brand decisions. Within that line, SocialMaster was the product for data insight and trend analysis, while the company's MINGJIAN system was described as China's largest third-party system for selecting and evaluating key opinion leaders — the influencers, known in China as KOLs, through whom brands increasingly marketed their products. AdMaster also offered cross-platform evaluation of soft brand marketing. Maggie Wang, as president, was responsible for the Social & Insight Analytics solutions.

RetailMaster and e-commerce measurement

AdMaster extended its measurement into online retail with RetailMaster, billed as China's first e-commerce data monitoring and solutions platform. The product was launched to help brands respond to the shift of consumer spending into e-commerce channels, applying the same monitoring logic used for advertising to the performance of products and promotions inside online stores. Together with its advertising verification and social products, RetailMaster gave the company coverage of the three data streams — media delivery, social conversation and transaction behaviour — that brands most wanted to connect.

Data security and assurance

Data handling was a sensitive part of AdMaster's business, and the company made security a public theme. Its chief technology officer, Hong Bei, said in 2016 that since 2006 the company had committed to putting data security first and had constantly increased investment in data security measures to help build a safe and transparent digital advertising market. In 2015 AdMaster became the only Chinese marketing data company to pass the ISAE 3402 assurance standard, an international benchmark for controls at service organisations. Founder Vincent Yan argued that by capturing, integrating and analysing digital touchpoints, companies could build close, even one-to-one, relationships with consumers — which made the governance of that data a core responsibility rather than an afterthought.

The JinShuJu acquisition and the data-hub strategy

On 3 November 2015 AdMaster announced the 100 percent acquisition of JinShuJu from ThoughtWorks. JinShuJu was described as the largest cloud-based SaaS online form platform in China, used by consumers and enterprises to improve process efficiency and data security. The deal was the first expression of a strategic investment approach AdMaster had established in early 2015, investing in data technology and science and in products that would facilitate its ambition to be 'the data hub in the enterprise data ecosystem'. JinShuJu was to be positioned both as a stand-alone product for consumers and as a complement to AdMaster's enterprise research product WendaX.com. Yan said the acquisition was just the beginning, and that the company would invite more allies into what it called its 'Happy World' to contribute to the success of the data technology industry and of brands.

Partnerships and industry role

AdMaster accumulated notable technology and data partnerships. In 2012 it became SAP HANA's first digital-marketing big-data partner in China, linking its marketing datasets to SAP's in-memory computing platform. In September 2017 it signed a strategic data partnership with Alimama, Alibaba's marketing arm, connecting its independent measurement data with one of China's largest advertising ecosystems. Alongside Miaozhen Systems and Tencent Beacon, it also co-established China's first anti-ad-fraud big-data laboratory, reflecting the shared industry interest in identifying invalid traffic and fraudulent advertising in a market where large sums moved on the strength of reported numbers.

PitchBook records AdMaster's status as acquired/merged, with a merger or acquisition completed in February 2019, and lists Baidu among the investors that backed the company over its history. By then the company had spent more than a decade as one of the defining independent data firms of China's digital marketing industry: a measurement business founded when online advertising in China was still young, which grew with the market into social analytics, e-commerce measurement and enterprise data services.

Legacy in China's marketing data market

AdMaster's significance lies less in any single product than in the role it normalised. It demonstrated that a third party, owning no media, could build a large business purely from measuring other people's marketing — and that leading brands would pay for independent verification at national scale. Its standards work with industry associations, its assurance certification, and its presence across advertising, social and e-commerce data made it a reference point for how China's marketing data industry understood itself during its formative decade.