Akshit Desai, Global Head of Publisher Growth, iion

Akshit Desai on Growth: Brands in Game, immersiion & Eye of the Tiger

1. Hey Akshit, tell us a bit about yourself! Who are you and what do you do?

I currently work as head of global publisher growth at iion. I live in London. Grew up in India and Kenya before moving to the UK for my education and then moved out for a while to India with stints in France and SG. Recently moved back to the UK again.

2. What is your dream holiday destination?

In terms of where I have been Maldives is up there and in terms of bucket list think South America.

3. A song plays every time you walk into a room. What song would choose and why?

An old classic Eye of the Tiger. Gets me charged up every time and my go to gym song - come to think of it it's been a while since I heard it 😊

4. What advice do you have for other people working in a remote company?

I think connect regularly with your peers online and where possible offline too. Not just work related. Our HR team at iion is really good at setting up monthly quizzes, we have social channels on slack related to interests, etc. Highlight though is always when we have company wide catch ups which last year we did in Turkey and Goa, India.

5. When you’re not helping publishers grow with monetization and advertising, what are you doing?

Mostly spending time with my family. I have a young son. I like to play games and in the few weeks of summer we get in the UK I dabble in some pretty poor standard recreational cricket.

6. How did you get into the mobile app space?

I joined iion last year after having met the founders in a previous organisation. I was impressed with what they had achieved and their vision. We had made a conscious decision to focus on gaming and that's how I entered this space. I have been in adtech for over 7 years now though.

7. Can you tell me a bit more about immersiion?

We saw that brands wanted to invest in gaming but were hesitant and we wanted to find a way to bring this demand to our publishers. Immersiion is a first of its kind self-serve platform designed specifically for buying gaming inventory. It allows brands and agencies to run self-serve campaigns which can be targeted at several levels from choosing ingame, aroundthegame, awayfromthegame down to selecting contextually relevant game genres. It has some really cool features such as a rich media creative builder and provides really detailed campaign reporting metrics. The response has been terrific and our demand team has done a great job onboarding brands and agencies. I am excited to roll this demand out to our publisher partners.

8. How can publishers reassure brands when it comes to investing in in-game advertising?

I think publishers are in a great position as brands are now very cognizant of the opportunity in gaming. They realize that that their desired audiences are now in gaming environments and their challenge is more around identifying the right channels to target them. Platforms like ours are helping brands find those channels and solving issues like lack of measurement options, which were holding back spends. For publishers its just a case of continuing to produce great content and being open to trying new formats like ingame. We shared some tactics at gf in Barcelona of things publishers can do and I would be happy to chat to anyone interested in finding out more.

9. What were your highlights from Gamesforum Barcelona?

Kudos to you guys for putting up a great event. I really enjoyed meeting some of our existing partners for the first time in person and we got to make new connections. Other than that, the panels were really engaging. It's great to get first hand insights from leaders in the space. And I liked the two and a half gamers session a lot. Shame about the weather - can you believe it was sunny in London when we were there

You can hear more from Akshit and iion at Gamesforum Hamburg in June! To learn more about imersiion check out our article here!