KARACHI: Smart Media4U Technology Pte Ltd has taken its first steps towards direct sales and partnerships in Pakistan by hiring Nabeel Khan, former head of sales of Connect Ads. In this new role, he will report to Sumit Batheja, the regional director of growth for the MENA region.
Khan told Profit that when he joined Connect Ads in 2012, he represented MSN.com and Windows Live Messenger in Pakistan, later shifting to representing ad sales for Skype and Outlook. When YouTube was banned, Connect Ads represented Dailymotion, Verizon Media, WeTransfer, and TubeMogul. Connect Ads is also the Twitter representative in Pakistan.
“I’ve joined SHAREit as associate director [of] sales & partnerships [for] Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal,” said Khan, in a statement to Profit. “[I will] increase the ad sales revenues in these markets focused on performance & branding opportunities.”
The Singaporean technology company operates SHAREit, an app for file sharing and a discovery engine for games & content. According to a pitch deck seen by Profit, SHAREit claims to account for 30% of all Android apps installed, allow users to transfer files and apps without using data, and have 1.8 billion users covering 200 countries in 45 languages.
According to SHAREit, it has nearly 14 million monthly active users (MAU) and between 2 million and 4 million daily active users in Pakistan, with the traction attributed to the design thinking applied to how the app is experienced by users: frictionless one click install, no email dependency or sign in required, and an ability to work seamlessly in low or zero network connection.
According to App Annie, SHAREit is the fifth most downloaded app in Pakistan. Sensor Tower analytics show that SHAREit has consistently placed in the top 50 free apps downloaded in Pakistan. When rankings are filtered to reflect top apps with file sharing and transfer capabilities, SHAREit is ranked in the top ten for Pakistan. Within the file sharing and transfer category, it competes with Zapya in Pakistan, which currently ranks in the top five in its category.
SHAREit app has also worked with local advertisers such as EasyPaisa, Jazz, Daraz, and RB, with future campaigns slated with food delivery and financial services companies as well. For Khan, traction is dependent on media agencies such as GroupM, Starcom, Synite, and Adcom.
In the H1’2020 Edition of the AppsFlyer Performance Index, SHAREit was placed in the first position with regards to growth amongst media publishers globally, while securing the top spot in the subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
For advertisers and agencies, the app allows ad targeting based on demographics, users, interests, and offers a data management platform (DMP) which targets psychographics, behaviors, and lookalike audiences.
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