Mintegral’s Phoena Pang on India’s gaming growth, AI and global ambitions

MUMBAI: With experience at Google and Moloco, Phoena Pang, VP, global sales & partnerships at Mintegral, leads the company’s global partnerships and business development across key markets. Her expertise spans ad-tech, programmatic advertising, performance marketing and mobile gaming.

In this conversation, she discusses India’s gaming growth, the gap between low acquisition costs and retention, hybrid monetisation, AI-led advertising, agentic AI and the growing opportunity for Indian developers to build for global audiences.

Mintegral’s India Gaming Growth Outlook 2026 points to a striking paradox: Indian user acquisition costs are among the cheapest in the world, yet 75 per cent of games see Day-30 retention fall below 3 per cent. What’s driving this gap between cheap installs and poor retention, and what should developers change in their design or UA strategy to close it?

Honestly, this paradox comes up in almost every conversation I have with Indian developers, and I get why it’s confusing. But when I look at the numbers, it actually makes sense. Installs here are among the cheapest in the world, so of course the temptation is to buy a lot of them. The problem is that cheap installs just mean the market is really good at delivering people who download. It tells you nothing about whether they’ll play. And that’s exactly why we’re seeing 75 per cent of games with Day 30 retention below 3 per cent.

So what do I tell people? Two things. First, stop optimising for cost per install. Optimise for what happens after, like a user who’s still around on Day 7, or someone who actually does something in your game. Point the algorithm at that, and it’ll go find people who stick. Second, obsess over the first session. Get players to the fun fast, be honest in your onboarding, and make sure your ads promise what your game actually delivers. If someone installs expecting one thing and opens something else, they’re gone in thirty seconds. The install was never the finish line. It’s the starting line.

As Indian gaming matures and attention shifts beyond real-money gaming, what new monetisation and ad-revenue models are you seeing gain traction with mainstream developers?

I find this genuinely exciting, because it’s where I see the most creativity right now. As attention moves past real money gaming, the studios I talk to aren’t picking between in app purchases and ads anymore. They’re blending them. Hybrid monetisation is really having its moment.

What’s working best are the ad experiences that respect the player. Rewarded video, where the user chooses to watch because they get something for it. Playables and interactive formats that actually entertain instead of interrupting. Offerwall style engagement that fits naturally into casual and mid core loops. The big mindset shift I keep encouraging is this: ads and player experience aren’t enemies. If you design the ad into your reward economy, it becomes part of the game. The developers who plan monetisation from day one, instead of bolting it on when they’re panicking about revenue later, are the ones building something that lasts.

Over 97 per cent of mobile game downloads in India happen on Android, well above the global average of around 86 per cent. How does this Android-heavy footprint shape how global and local brands allocate their programmatic ad spend in India?

This is one of my favourite things about India, actually. Over 97 per cent of mobile game downloads here happen on Android, compared to around 86 per cent globally. That makes India one of the most programmatically addressable markets on the planet, and I don’t think enough brands have fully internalised what a gift that is.

Android gives you richer, more consistent in app signal and a huge, biddable pool of inventory. So my advice on spend is pretty direct: lean into in app programmatic at scale, and design for Android first. That means building creative that works on a whole spectrum of devices, including lower end phones and users watching their data, with lightweight, fast loading formats. Where I see brands stumble is when they try to run an iOS first playbook here. India is Android native. Treat it that way and you’ll get more reach and better efficiency for every rupee you put in.

You’ve spoken about the industry’s shift from precise targeting to predictive modelling as privacy regulations and signal loss reshape mobile advertising. How does Mintegral’s AI and machine learning predict user behaviour in this more privacy-constrained environment?

I actually see this shift as a positive one, even though it is often framed as a loss. The industry is moving from relying on deterministic signals to predicting user outcomes, and prediction is becoming the more valuable capability. At Mintegral, our models learn from privacy-conscious, aggregated campaign and contextual signals to predict outcomes advertisers care about, such as engagement, retention, and long-term value. We are not relying on a single identifier. Instead, we focus on modelling outcomes in a way that supports performance while respecting privacy. The important point is that performance does not have to decline as tracking becomes more limited. With stronger prediction, measurement, and optimisation, advertisers can still find users who are likely to engage, return, and generate value.

That is the shift we are seeing in mobile advertising now: from precision based on individual-level tracking to performance driven by predictive intelligence.

Agentic AI is one of the defining conversations in media buying this year. How do you expect autonomous AI agents to change the day-to-day workflow of mobile performance marketers and agencies over the next twelve months?

Everyone’s asking me about this, and here’s my honest take. Over the next twelve months, I think autonomous agents are going to quietly absorb a huge chunk of the manual grind. Campaign setup, bid tweaks, shifting budgets around, iterating creative, pulling reports. All the stuff that eats a marketer’s day right now.

But I don’t see that as jobs disappearing. I see it as marketers finally getting to do the interesting part. Your role moves up. You set the objectives, you define the guardrails, you make the calls on strategy and brand and creative. Agencies are going to compete less on how fast they can execute and more on the quality of the goals they set and the ideas they bring. So my advice is: start now. Get your measurement clean and your objectives sharp, because an agent is only as good as the outcome you point it at. The people who win are the ones who pair the machine’s autonomy with real human intent.

When demographic tracking is limited, creative itself becomes the targeting mechanism. What role does Mintegral’s Mindworks creative studio play in helping developers test emotional hooks and interactive formats, and which ad formats are currently performing best with Indian audiences?

I say this a lot. When you can’t target by demographics, the creative becomes the targeting. Your format, your hook, the first three seconds. That’s what decides who leans in. And that’s exactly why we built Mindworks.

Our Mindworks studio lets developers test emotional hooks and interactive ideas quickly, see what actually lands, and scale the winners. It turns creative from a gut feel guessing game into something you can actually measure and repeat. In India specifically, the formats winning right now are the interactive ones. Playables, which let someone try the game before they install, perform beautifully. Rewarded video does really well because the value exchange is so clear and honest. Even interactive end cards punch way above their weight. The pattern is always the same: the creative that wins doesn’t just show you the game, it lets you feel it.

Many performance marketers still optimise primarily for short-term ROAS rather than long-term LTV. How can brands use smart bidding solutions, such as Target ROAS or Target CPE, to acquire users who genuinely stay and convert?

I get why people default to short term ROAS. It’s tangible, it’s this week, you can see it. But short term ROAS tells you what happened. LTV tells you whether you built something that lasts. And you can absolutely bridge the two.

The trick is to let smart bidding chase value instead of immediate return. With something like Target ROAS or Target CPE, you tell the system the outcome you care about, whether that’s a return target or a cost for a meaningful in app action, and it goes and finds users who actually get there. The part people underrate is picking the right event to bid toward. Don’t bid to an install. Bid to a tutorial completion, a Day 7 return, a first purchase, a signal that actually correlates with retention and revenue. Do that, and you stop buying installers and start buying players who stay and spend. It’s the cleanest way I know to stop overpaying for churn.

You’ve noted that India’s most ambitious studios are moving past the local install race and building clearer paths to global markets. How is Mintegral actively helping Indian developers scale and monetise internationally?

Many of India’s most ambitious studios are now looking beyond local install growth and building clearer paths to global audiences. Our job is to hand them a runway to the rest of the world. Felicity Games is a strong example of this shift. The Bengaluru-based studio has built its growth around a “build from India for the world” philosophy, creating games with global appeal while drawing on India’s deep talent base.

With titles such as Seek & Find, Felicity Games worked with Mintegral to scale user acquisition across international markets. Through our publisher relationships and access to high-quality global inventory, we supported their UA scale and performance goals.

For us, this is the kind of partnership that reflects where India’s gaming industry is heading: ambitious local studios building for global audiences, with the right growth infrastructure to reach players across markets.

We do it on both sides. On growth, we open up global UA demand and cross market audiences, plus localisation help, so a game built in Bangalore can actually find its people in North America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe. My whole point to developers here is this: you shouldn’t have to choose between building for India and building for the world.

As VP of Global Partnerships, what is your core message to Indian media buyers, agencies, and app developers as they plan their growth and user acquisition budgets for the remainder of 2026 and beyond?

If there’s one thing I want Indian media buyers, agencies, and developers to take into the rest of 2026, it’s this, stop competing on the install and start competing on the outcome. The market has handed you some of the cheapest acquisition anywhere in the world, so the strongest performers will be the teams that turn India’s acquisition efficiency into a loyal player base that stays, engages, and yields long-term value.

In practical terms, that means more budget into creative testing, more trust in predictive and value based bidding, and more attention to the whole funnel, from that first session all the way to lifetime value. India isn’t an emerging opportunity anymore, it’s a maturing one. And the studios that build for LTV and for global reach now are the ones who’ll define the next decade here. So plan for players, not installs.

Having lived and worked across mainland China, Hong Kong, Sweden, Canada, and the US—alongside your tenure at Google and Moloco, how has this global cross-cultural lens shaped how you approach high-growth, highly diverse markets like India?

Living and working across mainland China, Hong Kong, Sweden, Canada, the US, plus my time at Google and Moloco, taught me one lesson more than any other, there’s no universal playbook. Something that works brilliantly in one market can completely flop in the next, and the fastest way to fail in a fast growing, diverse market is to assume it looks like the last one you scaled.

So when I come to a market like India, I lead with curiosity, not confidence. And the first thing you learn is that India isn’t one market. It’s many. Different languages, different devices, different price sensitivities, wildly different player behaviours, all at once. If anything, my global experience is really just training in listening locally, pairing world class technical standards with genuine respect for the nuance on the ground. Global rigour, local empathy. That combination is exactly what a market as alive as India rewards.

As a prominent woman leader in the highly technical ad-tech and gaming space, what advice do you have for young women in India looking to build a career in technology, sales, and global partnerships?

The advice I’d give is the same one I had to learn myself: don’t wait until you feel 100 per cent ready to raise your hand. In technical spaces like ad-tech, it’s easy to assume you need to master every acronym before you speak up in a room. I’ve found the opposite is true. The people who grow fastest are the ones who ask the “obvious” question, admit what they don’t know, and learn out loud. Confidence in this industry is built by doing, not by waiting to feel qualified.

Second, get close to the technical side even if your role is sales or partnerships. You don’t need to be an engineer, but understanding how the product actually works, what drives performance, and what a partner’s real constraints are is what turns you from a relationship manager into someone the business truly depends on. That credibility opens doors faster than almost anything else.

Third, seek out global exposure early, even in small doses. Whether that’s a cross-border project, a call with a regional team, or just following how a market you don’t work in operates, that habit of thinking beyond your immediate context compounds over a career. India’s talent pool is exceptional technically; the differentiator is often comfort operating across cultures and ambiguity, and that’s a muscle you build by seeking it out, not waiting for it to be assigned to you.

And finally, find or become the person who tells other women “you’re ready” before they’ve convinced themselves. I’ve had people do that for me at pivotal moments, and I try to pay it forward. Representation in leadership matters less as a symbol and more because it changes who gets tapped on the shoulder for the next opportunity.

As India’s gaming and mobile advertising ecosystems mature, the focus is shifting from scale at any cost to sustainable growth, retention and lifetime value. For Mintegral, the opportunity lies in helping Indian developers combine smarter user acquisition, creative innovation and AI-led optimisation to compete not just in India, but on the global stage.