Founder and CEO OF Global Star Digital
William Ren (任宇飞) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Global Star, an AI-driven influencer marketing company working with more than 220 global brands across consumer electronics, smart hardware, and lifestyle. He founded the company in Vancouver in 2021, and in December 2024 was named to the Forbes China Top 100 Most Influential Chinese Elites.
William has led Global Star from a single-market start-up to a team of 120+ across North America, Europe, and Asia, backed by a Pre-A round VC and working with brands including DJI, Anker, Ecovacs, and Roborock. His focus now is the company's shift from campaign execution to Creator OS, an effort to turn the judgement produced by thousands of campaigns into a system the industry can work from.
Credentials
Founder of Global Star, an award-winning influencer marketing company working with over 220 global brands.Forbes China's 100 Most Influential Chinese Elites of 2024, recognised for building growth infrastructure for brands expanding into overseas markets.Architect of the AI platform behind Global Star's creator matching and campaign performance.As seen on
William Ren (任宇飞) grew up in North America and started out in publishing, founding a bilingual English and Chinese finance magazine. Alongside it, he ran forums and summits bringing Chinese companies and government delegations into North America, and later provided global PR support to cross-border DTC brands.
That work put him in front of a problem he kept hearing described in the wrong terms.
“The biggest problem for Chinese brands going global wasn't the product and it wasn't traffic. It was trust. These brands were already on the shelf. They just weren't in anyone's head yet.”
By late 2020, paid media was getting more expensive and less effective, and brands were starting to route budget through creators instead. William saw creators as the way to answer a more basic question than reach: what part does this brand actually play in someone's life?
Around 2023, William stopped describing Global Star as an agency. His account of why:
“When we started, I thought the job was simple. Do creator marketing more professionally and more efficiently than anyone else, and become a great global services company.
That wasn't wrong. We proved you can build a very good business by staying close to what clients actually need and executing well.
But as we ran more campaigns for more brands, I started noticing something underneath the work.
Every campaign produces knowledge. Which creator genuinely suits which product. What a fair price looks like.
Which content structures tend to produce results and which don't. Which ways of working with a creator hold up, and which fall apart. Which decisions get approved quickly on the client side. Where projects reliably get stuck.
That knowledge is the most valuable thing in this industry. It's judgement.
And we were losing all of it. A team would finish a campaign, having learned a huge amount, and the next campaign would start from someone's memory again.
That's when the question changed for me. It stopped being how do we run more campaigns. It became how does every campaign change the next one.
A bigger agency is still just a larger amount of human experience. What we want to build is a system that keeps the judgement, learns from it, and gets stronger.
That's why Global Star is becoming Creator OS.”
-William Ren, Founder and CEO
William is a regular voice on creator economics, market entry, and what brands get wrong when they scale influencer programs.
Originally published by Ebrun (亿邦动力), this article covered the 2021 Ebrun Cross-Border E-commerce Conference – Brand Globalization Summit, where William Ren, Founder & CEO of GS Media (now GlobalStar), was invited as a guest speaker.
Harriet Pan
William Ren interviewed by Chinese business media 硅兔赛跑
Harriet Pan
For Global Star, the long-term opportunity was clear: combine local market expertise and human relationships with technology to make global creator marketing more efficient, scalable, and measurable.
Harriet Pan
Article produced by the organizing committee of the 2024 Forbes China Top 100 Most Influential Chinese Elites selection.
Harriet Pan
