Meet Nina Cui – Country Manager, China

Earlier this year, a little before ChinaJoy, we were glad to add Nina Cui to our ranks as our new China Country Manager. Nina is a well-versed and experienced mobile marketer, so we’ve prepared this short interview to introduce her.

ChinaJoy 2021 Recap

Quickly after joining the team, Nina represented the company in ChinaJoy 2021, held in July in Shanghai, China. The current atmosphere in Ad-Tech is extremely interesting with consolidations happening left and right and Apple’s ATT, and conferences, in general, are more complex to attend due to COVID, so we interviewed Nina about what attendees felt about the current climate.

How did ChinaJoy 2021 feel compared to earlier years?

While there were fewer attendees in general, the exhibition floor was pretty busy, and attendees were eager to learn more about our solutions – Chinese advertisers are very interested in getting a good understanding of the way machine learning algorithms are designed for UA, and we’re happy to share how ours are custom-made for each advertiser.

What were the subjects most discussed on the exhibition floor?

Apple’s ATT and SKAN, of course, was the most discussed subject. As the adoption of iOS 14.5 was growing significantly at the time, advertisers expressed concerns about how the different UA channels can manage effective targeting without user-level data. Even there are still many unknowns around running SKAN at scale (and are still unknown to a degree to this day), advertisers showed much interest in testing different channels and learning which approach works best.

Also, as mentioned above, the advertisers showed great interest in ML-based DSP solutions – Chinese clients are by nature more hands-on and want to understand the optimization process, and they appreciate when the process is made clear to them.

How did COVID impact the conference and what did attendees feel about it?

Before COVID, ChinaJoy had between 4-5 B2B halls – and in this conference, there were only 1.5. The ChinaJoy organizers took many precautions in order to ensure the health and safety of the attendees due to a recent Delta variant outbreak in the area, and the attendees and exhibitors were all required to conduct tests within 48 hours of the exhibition starting.

While the testing drove many to cancel their attendance, and at times, the lines for testing were a bit chaotic, overall, the attendees cooperated well and enabled holding the conference in a semi-normal fashion. I personally enjoyed the event very much and can’t wait for more in-person events to start happening again at full scale in 2022.