TechBytes with Gregory Fulton, VP, Product, AdRoll

Gregory Fulton
VP, Product, AdRoll

Personalization, performance, and precision are the three new P’s of marketing for B2B teams. Targeted advertising is not new to B2B industry, even as AdRoll announced the general availability of its AdRoll ABM for HubSpot and Marketo customers. AdRoll ABM is a full-funnel platform for marketers and sales departments to personalize ads with CRM data and see the impact directly inside their CRM dashboard. To understand the finer nuances of AdRoll’s ABM product, we spoke to Gregory Fulton, VP of Product at AdRoll.

MTS: Tell us about your role at AdRoll and the team you handle?
Gregory Fulton: I have been AdRoll’s global head of product for the past seven years, but recently handed the reigns over to Aaron Bell, who moved from CEO to CPO. That freed me up to step into my new role as Head of Innovation, where I’m responsible for identifying and evaluating new areas of strategic investment. From there I then oversee the teams developing that next generation of products. It’s a really fun role — I get to learn a lot about new product categories, and then work with incredibly smart people across product, engineering, marketing, and sales to bring new ideas to market. The only downside is I now have one of those ridiculous titles you’d only find in Silicon Valley.

MTS: How does an ABM Advertising platform differ from those used for social selling and B2B commerce?
Gregory: Social selling, B2B commerce and ABM platforms all help to engage targeted prospects with relevant content, but ABM advertising platforms like AdRoll offer a more strategic approach for B2B marketers who are trying to scale growth and revenue. The typical B2B sales process is complex and the path to conversion can take months. It often involves online and offline touchpoints with people across siloed departments who are tracking leads with different tools — ABM helps to eliminate this. AdRoll’s ABM platform helps B2B companies eliminate the silos between their marketing and sales departments to target prospects with personalized ads. It’s the first ABM platform of its kind that is completely personalized and tailored for B2B companies. It enables them to easily target key roles at their named accounts and create highly-personalized ads. Marketers can also show the impact of their efforts harnessing both the power of their CRM and programmatic advertising.

MTS: How are modern marketing and remarketing platforms poised to better leverage attribution across all channels?
Gregory: With so many different devices and touch points, the customer journey is becoming increasingly complex. Modern marketers are using their data to understand the effectiveness of their campaigns, instead of just giving credit to where customers start or finish their journey. More and more, they are moving away from last-click and first-click and instead adopting custom attribution models, which helps them better understand every touch point.
However, there are still challenges. Often these custom models are still rule based, rather than data driven. I think until the market adopts data driven algorithmic attribution, they’ll always only have part of the story. One of my areas of focus is working with our attribution team to help marketers understand their options when it comes to attribution, and eventually drive them towards an algorithmic attribution solution that learns and evolves as their marketing mix evolves.

MTS: What are the key features of your performance engineering algorithm BidIQ?
Gregory: BidIQ is powered by artificial intelligence and built into all of our AdRoll products. It powers the 4 trillion performance data points that AdRoll logs every day. As a result, we’ve matched over 1.2 billion online profiles to data and devices in our IntentMap, one of the largest internet-based data sets available. Using our IntentMap data co-op, BidIQ learns how a company’s best customers behave online and finds more of them. It knows exactly what products to recommend and uses behavioral data to test the products that will drive tangible results. It can also automate budgets across campaigns and channels to reach a marketer’s goal and knows how to balance total ad spend to drive the highest ROI on a personalized budget.

MTS: How does it integrate with other marketing apps to ensure adherence to brand safety and transparency guidelines?
Gregory: AdRoll has many internal and external safeguards in place to reduce the likelihood of ads showing up in undesirable environments. In addition to a global blacklist of potential undesirable sites, we have a 48-hour takedown policy where we provide support to our clients that raise concerns. We negotiate direct deals with premium publishers to access high quality inventory, and use 3rd party ad verification partners to measure and continuously improve brand safety.

MTS: By integrating with high-level CRMs, how does AdRoll expand the reach of marketing campaigns? Is there any scope to include video content automation in these integrations?
Gregory: AdRoll’s integrations with platforms, like HubSpot and Marketo help sales and marketing better target their most valuable customers and speed up customer activations. Marketers can not only create campaigns targeting their key accounts, but can also clearly see AdRoll’s impact directly in their CRM to improve the handoff to sales. These integrations reveal new insights to access, enrich and target leads. Customers can also see the impact of their campaigns, with access to both platforms simultaneously.
We are constantly expanding our capabilities into new high performing formats – our recent product launch around native ads is an example of that. Video is obviously gaining a ton of momentum, and we’re currently exploring how best to leverage it in the context of performance marketing & ABM. But we’re hearing a lot of demand from the market for video, and our early tests are performing well – so it’s an opportunity that we’re excited about.

MTS: How do you see programmatic capabilities influencing ABM success?
Gregory: We have 10 years of experience in performance and programmatic advertising and over 16,000 B2B clients, so we are bringing a performance-first approach to ABM. This means we deliver personalized ABM campaigns at scale and help marketers to improve click-through rates by nearly double and improve cost-per-clicks by nearly 30 percent.^[1] ABM helps to close the traditional disconnect between sales and marketing departments. By combining the capabilities of our performance stack with robust integrations (such as HubSpot and Marketo), organizations are able to better identify and target leads who are similar to current high-value customers.

^[1] ¹ Q4 2015 -Q1 2017, AdRoll internal metrics.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Gregory.
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Also Read: AdRoll Launches New ABM Advertising Platform to Increase ROI for B2B Marketers