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Aida Gao
Head, Corporate Communications, Greater China at Rolls-RoyceAida Gao has 10+ years of experience in Corporate Communications and stakeholder management for MNCs in Europe, Singapore, and Mainland China.
Prior to joining Rolls-Royce, Aida managed both internal and external communications as well as public affairs at Syngenta, a Swiss Agribusiness recently acquired by ChemChina, which marked China’s largest overseas deal to date. She worked at Syngenta’s global Headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, to support the group’s strategic transformation and a massive investor and media initiative between 2010 and 2011.
Aida started her career at Novozymes, a leading Danish biotech company specialised in enzymes for industrial applications, where she grew her passion for Corporate Communications and Reputation Management.
Aida received her Master’s degree in Communications from the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University. She also has a Bachelor’s degree in International Economy& Trade from UIBE in Beijing.
Aida is a local Beijingnese, divorced in 2012, currently single. She likes traveling, reading, and going to musicals whenever she can, and does skateboarding and snowboarding as a hobby. She has no kids or pets, but a couple of betta fish if that counts.
Christian Jensen
Founder of CCA Marketing ConsultantsChristian Jensen is the founder and principal at CCA Marketing Consultants, a boutique marketing consultancy based in Beijing focusing on the luxury, travel and automotive segments. CCA is the agency of record for the city of Beverly Hills in China.
Christian began his career in China in corporate communications and public affairs at Weber Shandwick, a leading global public relations agency. In 2013, he left to join the flagship PR agency of Publicis, MSLGROUP, serving key clients including the Mexico Tourism Board, Volkswagen Group China, Porsche China, and P&G.
Christian was a key consultant in developing a comprehensive national branding strategy for Mexico in China, working directly with multiple levels of government to devise an integrated strategy for PR, social, event-based and G2B campaigns, culminating in a multi-million dollar traveling exhibition, Encuentrate con Mexico. The exhibition made its global debut in Beijing.
Since founding his own company, Christian has retained a strong interest in destination marketing and nation branding. Since early childhood, he has had a love of languages, experiencing new cultures and being on the road. The child of South American immigrants to the US, Christian speaks and writes English, Spanish and Chinese fluently.
In addition to CCA, Christian oversees award winning Beijing restaurant, Palms LA Kitchen and Bar, which he cofounded with his husband in 2013. Prior to relocating to Beijing, Christian was a hepatology research associate at Cedars-Sinai, a major private research hospital on the US West Coast.
Christian received his Bachelor of Chinese from the University of California Los Angeles.
In his spare time, Christian enjoys fitness, cooking, skiing, and ceramics.
Ella Kidron
International Communications at JD.comElla Kidron is the International Communications Manager at JD.com, China’s largest online retailer, based in Beijing. She previously spent several years in New York at a leading international communications consultancy before transitioning to the firm's Beijing office. Ella has significant experience advising clients on communications around crisis and litigation, M&A and digital as well as U.S.-Asia cross-border mandates.Some of her past projects have included corporate reputation and litigation support for BP following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident and oil spill and advising leading technology companies pre-IPO. Prior to that, Ella worked briefly as a blogger for National Public Radio based in Pasadena, focused on the Arts & Culture section.
Driven by her passion to reduce her carbon footprint and impact on the environment, Ella serves as an advisor to a young start up dedicated to education around easy, everyday ways to reduce environmental impact and has organized and participated in beach clean ups around the world as part of this effort.
Ella graduated from the University of Southern California with degrees in International Finance and Chinese. A four-year varsity athlete, Ella has competed in several national and international swimming competitions, including the 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials.
In her spare time, Ella enjoys spinning, yoga, traveling and hiking. Always eager to learn something new, she recently began an online course to learn basic computer programming skills.
Simon Vericel
Founder of Influence MattersSimon is a geek, an entrepreneur, passionate about the mechanisms of influence, and I can’t stay away from news portals. He leads Influence Matters with the vision that only great work will drive the agency’s growth, so he puts his clients’ results before anything else at work. Simon specializes in creating impactful ways to activate ecosystems of influence to generate awareness in highly targeted circles, with a particular focus on technology, market entry, corporate, brand and product communications.
He has been in China continuously since 2002, spending all of his career at two international agencies running high profile cross-border influencer engagement strategies for large global and Chinese organizations, before figuring out these agencies’ structure did not suit the need for flexibility and efficiency required by today’s fast-growing tech companies. So he set up Influence Matters in 2015 to fix that.