Nimit Panpalia, Global Head of Developer Acquisitions at POKKT, says, “I believe gaming will be the biggest growth industry in Southeast Asia and India, and I want to make a difference during the growth phase of gaming.” Nimit’s work focuses on interacting with game developers to show them how the POKKT SDK would be an asset in their monetization strategy. They discussed POKKT’s vision of the latter in a panel at Casual Connect Asia 2016 along with colleagues from Appodeal, VMAX, Vungle and AdColony, as well as shared more details of their personal views with Gamesauce: Nimit knows devs avoid ad networks and as a result, wants to become a part of their business.
Nimit brings more than 19 years of experience in strategy and business development to this current position. After a career spanning nine years in the print and recruitment industry Nimit began evaluating different industries, looking for one that would be a game changer in his career, and eventually settled on the game industry. Since gaming was new to India and choices were relatively limited in the country, Nimit’s next step was connecting with all the gaming companies in the world.
Nimit and CEO of POKKT, Rohit Sharma, knew each other before Rohit founded POKKT; later, when looking for help with his own company, Nimit was thrilled with POKKT’s vision of how to help game developers realize a profit. Joining the company was a natural step from there. Now, the most enjoyable part of the job is meeting and spending time with game developers, learning of their vision and goals, and assisting them in both a professional and personal capacity.
Building Relationships
One of the biggest challenges for developer acquisitions is the fact that game developers are constantly getting emails and follow-ups from ad networks and just don’t like being pursued this way. So Nimit decided it would make more sense to become part of their business and help them in their overall strategy, rather than just become an ad network professional, and relates, “I am very proud and happy that in the last 2 years I have managed to have a lot of friends who are now also POKKT partners.”
When Nimit began working at POKKT, the first focus was on activating the Southeast Asia markets, a new area for him as well as POKKT. Nimit immediately began making connections within each of the countries and is very proud of having built close relationships with more than 450 game developers in 2015 alone. Support from CEO Rohit and the tech team was of great help in reaching this achievement.
The Power of Video Ads
Because Nimit is seeing how brand video advertising is evolving, he believes video ads will be the ad unit of choice for game developers. POKKT has always focused on video ads; their goal is to be the number one ad network doing video ads across India and Southeast Asia.
Monetization will always be an essential for game studios; POKKT assists with this by educating brand managers and their media planners to understand the power of video ads in gaming. Nimit explains, “We are confident that once we get the support of the big brands, we will be able to solve the monetization issue of game developers to a large extent.”
Planning for Monetization
When planning for the future, game developers need to analyze their players’ habits and use data analytics and data scientists to help them define the touchpoints, Nimit insists. “I don’t think that having a banner or interstitial will ever monetize properly in the future and rewarded video ads will have the highest market share in ad units.”
In helping smaller companies with their monetization issues, Nimit advises, “Be local. Understand where your players are coming from and use the right ad network to monetize. Also, use different ad networks or mediation to ensure that you get maximum fill rate, which will allow you to optimize monetization efficiency for each and every player.”
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