SY Lau receiving the Cannes Lions Media Person of the Year Award

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SY Lau is the senior executive vice president of Chinese internet company Tencent and the president of its Online Media Group (OMG), which operates the company’s online media services and platforms.

What do Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Rutgers’ SY Lau have in common? Granted, that’s a tough one. The answer is this: these visionary executives preside over internet behemoths, and all three have received the Cannes Lions Media Person of the Year Award for their talents. In June, SY Lau became the first executive of a Chinese company to receive the prestigious annual award, which recognizes a person who has influenced today’s media landscape.

Lau RBS’04 is the senior executive vice president of Chinese internet company Tencent and the president of its Online Media Group (OMG), which operates all of the company’s online media services and platforms.

When Lau first joined the company in 2006, OMG offered only one internet  portal. “The internet had not really ramped up in China,” Lau says. “The population of internet users had just passed 100 million, which was approximately 10 percent of the total population.”

Today, the story is quite different. OMG is now a “media matrix,” offering users an online video-streaming service, news portal, microblogging platform, and more. The video-streaming service Tencent Video reaches 50 million mobile users daily, providing them with British and American programming as well as original content. And 250 million mobile users accessed Tencent News daily in January of this year alone.

An exclusive media partnership between OMG and the National Basketball Association will bring full seasons of live and on-demand games to Chinese fans, online and via mobile devices. And OMG will soon launch the Digital Ad Ratings  system, a joint effort with Nielsen.

“This award not only demonstrates the success of Tencent OMG, but also highlights the rise of China as a global force for online innovation, creativity, and provision of the highest-quality content,” Lau says. “I hope that winning this recognition is just the beginning of our commitment toward building a world of oneness through connectivity.”