At Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki we’ve had opportunities to talk to a variety of amazing people about their work. One of our largest events yet, PGC Helsinki saw more than 1500 attendees and a variety of talks from major companies such as Huawei, King and Tencent. Not only that, but we also got the opportunity to sit down and discuss the in-depth observations of a number of attendees. Previously this has been people such as VP of Sales at Moloco, Will Melzer and Director of Growth for Adjoe, Carly Ostasiewski.
This time around we sat down with VP of Huawei Mobile Services, Dr Jaime Gonzalo (Phd. of Video Game, Digital & Online Business) to discuss Huawei’s approach to advertising and promoting apps from their store. Huawei utilises its own storefront, AppGallery, and Dr Gonzalo discussed the advantages of owning the entire ecosystem in contrast to other storefronts such as Google Play. We discussed a variety of topics including Huawei’s approach to privacy and data, as well as the impact GDPR had on them.
“Privacy by design”
According to Dr Gonzalo the Huawei ecosystem was designed from the ground up to provide privacy, and the integration of GDPR did little to hamper their operations. “We get data based on your personal information but on your preferences, so as a consequence our ads are not spam, they are trusted recommendations which makes the CPI much better and keeps the rate really strong. It’s like a trusted friend that would say ‘Why don’t you try this game?’”.
The insistence around personalisation of ads and privacy is of course not a new approach, but for Huawei in the wake of international concerns over their use of data it’s important for them to emphasise what they do and don’t collect. As Gonzalo states, both their proprietary search engine and maps system, Petal Search and Petal Maps respectively, are “Incognito by default.”
As for what Huawei is looking to do in the future, “So what we are focusing on is the value proposition for the users.” Dr Gonzalo says that the main focus will be on achieving user activation, not just focusing on installations but to get their users to continuously engage over time.
