Welcome to Extra Mile by KnowledgeNile, an interview series where industry leaders discuss innovations, tech trends, marketing tactics, and expert insights.
Today, we have Lizzie Chapman, Vice President, Technology Partnerships and Channels of AdRoll, a marketing platform that helps B2C businesses run, measure, and optimize multi-channel campaigns. AdRoll uses AI to analyze data and drive sales, facilitating more than $246 billion in annual sales for over 120,000 brands.
Hello Lizzie! It's great to have you with us!
What led you to become the VP of Technology Partnerships and Channels at AdRoll?
Ans. I began my career in account management, and now have over a decade of experience in business development and partnership roles. Although most of my experience has been on the supply side of adtech, I had a stint at an agency where I got to see the buying side of adtech, and it made me miss working for a tech company. So, when an opportunity at NextRoll presented itself, I jumped at it. A new division called Platform Services was created, in which NextRoll was helping other companies build their own ad platforms, but when the pandemic happened, no one was investing in massive digital transformation projects. At the time, I was speaking with leadership about multiple opportunities, including building out AdRoll’s technology and channel partner program. I led the program by building partnerships with Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, Klaviyo and others. In 2023, I took on RollWorks’ partnerships program and AdRoll’s Channel Sales organization as we looked to have one leader across all partnership initiatives.
What key components have contributed to your professional growth?
Ans. People Leadership: During my time at VaynerMedia, I had the opportunity to oversee a team of 40 people, and although I missed the tech platform, I loved helping my team grow, learn, and take on new challenges. However, it took a while to get there. One year post-undergrad, I was put in a manager position, which was exciting and overwhelming all at the same time. My only leadership role at the time was as captain of a sports team, and various jobs, from cashier to intern at a social media company. My approach was remembering the things I liked and didn’t like about previous managers and how to motivate people as a team captain. Over the years, I have learned through failure and success, and I have read a lot about leadership, but I’ve always approached management as a team sport. We win together and lose together, but I’m ultimately responsible and accountable for whatever happens. I try to create a space where I’m transparent, and my team feels safe to be transparent as well. In turn, I’m quickly aware of any problems. This transparency and trust also allows my team to brainstorm, be bold and ultimately innovate.
Building New Things: I love solving problems—always have and always will. When an issue arises, I’m eager to find a solution or a way around it. This mentality is what has led me to various roles at different companies. Generally, I’ve taken on roles where something new needs building, whether it’s a programmatic division, a video offering, a partnerships program, etc. While I love building things, I don’t find much joy in maintaining them once they’re successful. Therefore, I’m typically looking for new opportunities, and whatever I’ve learned in one role is usually applicable to my next role.
Helping Others: I enjoy helping others, sharing what I learned and making connections. These traits are especially important in partnerships. In fact, I wrote a blog post about it.
What is the importance of tech partnerships in today’s highly competitive market? How do you ensure AdRoll’s partnerships are impactful?
Ans. Partnerships build trust with your customer base and prospects. They’re another platform that your prospects use that essential vouches for your platform. In the crowded martech and ad tech marketplace, cutting through the noise is challenging, and tech partners are a great tool for doing so.
In the adtech world, data is a hot commodity, especially with third-party cookie deprecation. Integrating with platforms that have first-party data, like Shopify or Klaviyo, is an essential part of our strategy to allow advertisers to continue audience targeting. Also, customers typically have a stack of tech partners that they work with, and it’s a bit of a hassle if these platforms aren’t connected already to seamlessly port and activate your data across multiple platforms.
It's crucial to bring things to market quicker. So, while some companies debate building, buying, or partnering, we’re already ahead of the curve. For example, our partnership with Improvado let us build ten reporting connections about ten times faster than we could have done on our own. So, partnering can be extremely beneficial to quickly bring products to market. We’re excited to continue to utilize our Improvado partnership to bring additional channels into our cross-channel attribution tool
AdRoll has been assisting D2C businesses for years. What strategies does the company adopt to identify and meet the varying needs of its clients?
Ans. SMB Focus: We make it really easy to connect your ecommerce or CRM platform, integrate your audience data and set up three automations that can essentially be your entire programmatic and social advertising strategy. Regarding feedback, our customer support team rotates our self-service accounts quarterly to provide additional support and gather feedback. On top of that, our CSM team is available 24/7 for any client needs.
Mid-Market Focus: Our account management teams are experts in programmatic advertising and offer advice to our mid-market customers on their strategy and tactics. They also provide our product team with customer feedback to evolve our product, which has led to us building cross-channel attribution and CTV products.
Creative: Our creative services team develops creative for any customer who wants to utilize this offering. For smaller businesses without a creative team or agency this is a huge benefit and they can use the creative on any channel they wish. For mid-market and larger brands, this service allows them to change creative more often, make quick edits as needed to drive performance and test new formats.
Attribution: Over the years, we have had customers and agencies of many sizes struggle to attribution performance across all their channels. So, in 2023, we partnered with Improvado to develop a cross-channel attribution offering that our customers could leverage within the AdRoll user interface.
What emerging trends have reshaped digital marketing lately, and how is AdRoll adapting to these trends?
Ans. Google’s announcement of third-party cookie deprecation is a significant change that could impact AdRoll, mainly our retargeting business. As soon as the announcement was made, our Head of Engineering and Data Science got involved in World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working groups, where our team was actively involved in writing and contributing to API specs. We’ve had 20 engineers dedicated to future-proofing efforts for the last 18 months, including building into Google’s Privacy Sandbox, being named a market testing grantee for the CMA report, integrating probabilistic and deterministic IDs, and building integrations that make it easier for our customers to onboard first-party data for targeting. We’ve taken a potential hit to our business and turned it into an opportunity to innovate and lead privacy forward advertising while keeping our customers educated throughout the process. Our goal has been to change as little as possible so our advertisers can continue running their advertising as they always have.
Beyond retargeting being impacted, third-party cookies are how most of the digital ad ecosystem measures attribution. We have been heavily involved in testing the Privacy Sandbox reporting APIs and provided feedback on how to improve them. For example, one API works well for attribution if you are a large brand with many conversions, but does not for smaller brands with less conversions and we’ve made recommendations on how to improve this API to allow for all brands to measure attribution.
Lastly, the number of social media and walled gardens platforms has grown significantly over the past few years and the focus on omnichannel became even more important. We helped small and medium-sized businesses consolidate their platforms with our connected ads. Our offering allowed them to manage campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest alongside programmatic in our user interface. We have since added cross-channel attribution that includes more channels to view how each channel is performing along with insights to help customers optimize across all their channels in one platform, saving them time logging into every platform and helping them make budget and optimization decisions.
What role does brand awareness play in successful marketing campaigns, and what tactics does AdRoll incorporate to boost brand awareness for its clients?
Ans. Brand awareness is vital to any marketing campaign. While it’s difficult to directly show the impact of brand awareness, many studies have been done to show that if you stop brand awareness spending, conversions decreased. The way I think about it, for example, is why do I buy Patagonia over The North Face? I can come up with a bunch of tangible reasons, but honestly I like their branding more. And brands need to consider how their customers or potential customers think about and relate to their brand. AdRoll has released several features over the past few years to ensure our customers have various approaches to brand awareness, including a proprietary contextual and demographic offering that is not reliant on third-party cookies to find new audiences. Additionally, we have set up private marketplace deals with our supply partners for tent pole branding moments such as holidays, back to school, etc. Lastly, we have been running a beta for CTV, which will provide another channel for our customers to run brand awareness campaigns on another device.
Is leadership challenging? What major challenges do you usually encounter as the VP of Technology Partnerships and Channels at AdRoll, NextRoll, and RollWorks?
Yes, of course, it has its moments. Competing priorities are always present, and as someone who likes building new things, it can be challenging when you have to prioritize one team’s or person’s priorities over another. The goal is to explain the overarching business need and how this person can focus their energy in the meantime.
I manage a diverse set of teams, some small, some big, some with revenue quotas and some with strategic goals, which requires me to switch my mindset throughout the day. What matters and motivates one person or team doesn’t work for all of them. So it’s essential to find that through getting to know each individual and showing up the best I can for everyone.
NextRoll was recently included in the Top 100 Inspiring Workplaces in North America! How do you ensure your workforce remains motivated and productive, ultimately contributing to the company’s success?
Ans. I get to know each person, ask what they like to do, don’t like to do, what they want in the future, and just learn about them as humans. Knowing all of that allows me to direct their energy towards things they want to do. It doesn’t mean they never have to do things they don’t like to—we all have to do that—but it can be balanced out at least.
In addition, I really like to get people involved in projects that will push them to grow and learn what they are capable of doing or expose them to something new. I also have a keen eye for when people are working too much or getting burned out, and I step in to help with prioritization and delegation. Lastly, I share as much as possible about why we are or are not doing something. People don’t like being kept out of the loop about why something is happening, so I try my best to keep my team well-informed and armed with a ‘why’ or the ‘what’ behind any decision made.
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