Interview

Chinese ads firm PapayaMobile opens London office to extend European reach

CEO Si Shen discusses the big move and future plans

Chinese ads firm PapayaMobile opens London office to extend European reach

China-headquartered performance advertising company PapayaMobile offers a suite of tools and services to help developers get their games in front of users.

From Facebook and Google ads campaign management to its ad serving solutions across platforms like Twitter, Bing and Snapchat, the firm has built up a wide portfolio for marketers to harness.

In addition to its ads management platform, PapayaMobile also has its own performance DSP, that can take campaigns on a performance metric, designed for app developers looking to quickly scale audience numbers.

The company already has offices in North America and China, but now it has its eyes set on offering a global service by establishing an office in the heart of London to spur on growth in Europe.

“In the last three years Papaya has expanded rapidly becoming the primary resource for Chinese developers looking to buy search and social traffic globally from China as well as developing our own performance DSP and ad exchange,” says PapayaMobile CEO Si Shen.

“We are now responsible for running these large global campaigns across multiple platforms in a way that generates quality installs from recognised sources for these developers. By opening our London office, we're now looking to offer this expertise to EMEA game and app developers.”

Shen says Europe is the most dynamic and successful market for developing new games, and also contains some of the world’s most important digital advertising markets.

PapayaMobile CEO Si Shen is eyeing up growth in the EMEA markets

And she believes that developers and publishers in the region can stand to benefit from PapayaMobile’s extensive reach around the world.

“We have been working in mobile performance for a decade now in some of the most competitive markets out there,” says Shen.

“Our solution going through search, social and display means that partners will be acquiring users through recognised sources and traffic benefiting from both the scale of our campaigns and our technology.”

One of the new challenges facing most companies in the games industry - and indeed businesses in numerous sectors that may hold information on people - is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that’s being introduced in Europe.

By opening our London office, we're now looking to offer this expertise to EMEA game and app developers.
Si Shen

The aim is to help secure peoples’ private data and ensure only the information they want companies to have is available to them. Shen says PapayaMobile is already supporting developers to understand the new regulations, as well as overcome other key challenges like fraud.

“Our search, social and DSP products all work through well recognised channels minimising the opportunities for fraud and maximising transparency,” she says.

“Our search and social products are also fully GDPR compliant. We also look to be at the forefront of helping our Asian clients understand the implications of GDPR.

“In terms of monetisation, PapayaMobile is the destination for outbound marketing dollars from Chinese developers. This means we can bring EMEA developers, new clients and incremental gains in budget. We can connect programmatically, through SDK and API giving flexibility in how developers use us to make money.”

As the company moves forward with its European expansion, Shen says that as well as looking to help developers get higher quality users at a better rate, it also has plans to launch more of its own products and better solutions for user acquisition and monetisation.

“For instance we are looking at developing playable ads as a more efficient mechanism for introducing Asian campaigns to EMEA,” explains Shen.

“Growth in EMEA is central to our business and we’re here to stay.”

Find out more on the PapayaMobile website.

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