UpYourStack with NextRoll

[00:00:00] AI comes in because you have over a billion user profiles and then now you have the data and the billion profiles. And it gives you the ability to predict what's going to happen in terms of User Behavior. 

[00:00:17] We do more predictions on an everyday basis than the New York Stock Exchange. And that is because of the trillions of data points we are processing and the billions of profiles that we have.

[00:00:31] And we have built the algorithm for BidIQ as a homegrown algorithm. It is not third party tech. It's not somebody else's large language model. It is our own model that we have built and we are able to make predictions about and do optimizations on ad, budget, pacing, the price at which we bid.

[00:00:54] So collectively, BidIQ and InIQ are fundamental [00:01:00] components of our platform. And this has been existent for the last dozen years.

[00:01:05] Hello and welcome to UpYourStack, the podcast for sales, marketing, and operations leaders looking to optimize their HubSpot tech stack and drive better business outcomes. I'm your host, Noah Berk, co-CEO of Aptitude 8, and in today's episode we're joined by Vibhor Kapoor, Chief Business Officer at NextRoll, where he leads AdRoll and RollWorks.

[00:01:26] With decades of experience across marketing, product management, and partnerships, Vibhor brings unique insights on scaling SaaS businesses and helping ambitious marketers succeed. We'll explore how RollWorks complements HubSpot to supercharge your growth. 

[00:01:40] Let's dive in. Vibhor, welcome to the show. And just to kick things off 1) I'd love for you to share with our listeners your background, your title, and what does NextRoll do?

[00:01:52] Absolutely happy to do that. Excited to be here. Noah, thanks for hosting us. So Vibhor Kapoor, I'm the Chief Business Officer at [00:02:00] NextRoll. Now you'll say, okay, what's NextRoll? NextRoll is a digital marketing and advertising company. We serve two kinds of brands, business to consumer. These are brands that are trying to engage with customers directly. But we also work in an account-based model where we work with businesses that are trying to engage with other businesses. We've been around for almost 15 years and we have worked with a lot of businesses, including the HubSpot Ecosystem, where we help them identify high propensity accounts and customers, and then we helped them engage with them through advertising.

[00:02:45] Let's talk about that because I mean, that's pretty much what everyone wants to do. They want to go after the high profile customers, you know, whether it's account based marketing and engagement. That's like the perfect world overall. How do you and NextRoll really [00:03:00] engage those customers or help these clients engage their top customers?

[00:03:04] Yep. 

[00:03:05] At the most fundamental level, if you look at any company that's solving for marketing or advertising, right? What you have to do is you have to do a really good job of identifying prospects. You have got to do a great job of prioritizing them and then be able to deliver the right message at the right time and then bring those insights back to sales and marketing.

[00:03:31] That's at the most fundamental level what we do. Now you'll say, "Okay, that makes sense, but tell me more. How do we do it in the HubSpot?"

[00:03:38] Beat me to the punch. That was my next question. Tell me more. This sounds fantastic.

[00:03:43] Yeah, what we've done is we've built a bidirectional integration with HubSpot and in that integration what we do is we take your audience data from your HubSpot contact list and segments, and we bring them [00:04:00] on to the RollWorks platform. RollWorks is our account based marketing and targeting platform. And what you do is once you bring that data in, we are able to run it through our Machine Learning model and are able to do a high fit analysis. And then once we have figured out what are the high fit, high intent accounts, we are able to engage them through advertising. And once we engage them through advertising, delivering the right message and at the right time, we bring those insights back into HubSpot. So that's how it's bidirectional. And you do that on a continuous basis in a self learning mode and gives you the ability to get great impact. So at the most fundamental level helping drive growth. How? Through a bidirectional HubSpot integration.

[00:04:54] So where are these ads being served? Is this like on LinkedIn? Is this on other platforms? Like [00:05:00] where are people seeing these advertisements? And then is the ads themselves being created by you or is it being created by the end user and saying, "I want a call-to-action to drive them to a website, for example." I guess, share a little bit more where they are and how they're being produced.

[00:05:16] Yep, absolutely. So in terms of the modalities where ads are served, you can think about web, you can think about native ads, you can think about social and you can now in the new context also think about connected TV and Digital Out-of-Home. Those are new areas where we are pressing on. But at the most fundamental level, I would say when it comes to business-to-business customers, and they tend to be on the open web and on social platforms.

[00:05:46] So let's think about a B2B company. Let's say you're a technology company and you have a data analytics solution, right? You would be engaging with customers on the open web aka New York Times [00:06:00] or let's say any kind of other open web publication. Also on LinkedIn and then increasingly on the new media that we are seeing a lot of uptake on which is connected TV, audio and Digital Out-of-Home.

[00:06:15] Interesting. And so how do you know, that's the person. To some people, I think they think of this as like magic. We all hear about, "Hey, I just heard this, you know, I was just talking to my friend about X, Y, Z. All of a sudden I'm seeing this ad." Obviously that's a fun one, which has had more information about, which is different, of course, in what you do. But how do you know who these people are and where they're going? going?

[00:06:38] A lot of this is around the Machine Learning Technology that we have built over the last one decade. I think this is actually a good segue to talk about how the NextRoll come about. Our founders really wanted to solve for multi-channel advertising. Our Founders really started with making a bake at home high [00:07:00] protein energy bars. They wanted to bring that to market and they felt that there were no means to be able to engage and find audiences across multiple modalities. So that was the birth of retargeting. This is going 15 years back, and this was all in a direct to consumer context.

[00:07:18] Over the years, we have built a very strong technology platform where what we do is we understand user behavior across multiple websites, and when I say multiple, I'm talking about millions of domains, tens of thousands of websites. And what we do is when a user engages with a certain piece of content, whether it's an article, whether it's a post, whether it's an ad impression, we understand their behavior and we classify it into topics.

[00:07:54] We also scan various news sites and we take all of that data. And we have built [00:08:00] it into an cross device identity graph. And it may sound sneaky, but it really isn't. What we're doing is we're really understanding user behavior. And our intent is to deliver to them relevant content. So think about all of the data that we have gathered, and the identity graph that we have created, which makes it easy for someone to understand that, you know, Vibhor is interested in black sweaters. He's also a technology executive who's looking for a new web analytics tool and is into guitars. And I will always want more ads about guitars from Guitar Center than I would want.

[00:08:43] I can tell by your background. Yeah.

[00:08:45] Well, I have questions about your favorite protein bar, but I'll come back to that one. How does this work in the age of privacy and especially the rules around privacy, like GDPR? Walk me through that. Cause I do think that was one of your responsibilities at one point. Privacy itself.

[00:08:58] Yes, [00:09:00] absolutely. We actually take pride at NextRoll that we are one of the most privacy forward marketing and advertising companies. Now we know that there is a lot of sentiment in the market about, "Hey, how is my data being used?" And then there's also questions in the market as to how things will continue to happen in the post-third party cookie world.

[00:09:23] Now, if you've been tracking some of the news from Google, we know that third-party cookies are going to go away eventually, and Google is working through some of the technologies on how you'll be able to do User Identification and Targeting in the post-3PC world. So we've been working very actively in the industry on that.

[00:09:44] In fact, we started to work with Google has an initiative on, this is called the Privacy Sandbox Initiative. And we've been members in the Privacy Sandbox Initiative from its inception. And we have written a new set [00:10:00] of guidelines where you can still continue to understand user behavior in a more abstracted manner than today, it is. But be able to understand it in terms of interest groups and be able to target them in the Post Third-Party Cookie World. We actually were one of the testees for this Privacy Sandbox Technology, and I'm actually really proud to say that we were the only B2B marketing and advertising platform that actually has working technology that will work in the post-3PC world. So, certainly privacy forward advertising a big bet for us. And we really think that it is possible that you can keep user data private. But also create relevant content which engages them. 

[00:10:59] It's like two [00:11:00] opposite things coming together as one. That's pretty awesome. Will this pass legal muster? Because you obviously nowadays. I mean, I just know for some of our largest clients... I think of insurance and financial services and health care. The very first thing they ask "Is this GDPR compliant?" And they want to make sure they dot every I and cross every T. Does this new approach enable it to pass the legal muster?

[00:11:22] I'm no legal counsel or an assessor in that sense. 

[00:11:26] I like disclaimer, listeners. No legal counsel here.

[00:11:32] Not a practicing lawyer or a lobbyist by any means. Yeah, but I would say at the heart of the Privacy Sandbox Initiative, this was really the core principle that was there. Which is how do you identify audiences and engage them in a compliant manner? So, in fact, the testing results that we talked about, the testing that we wrapped up with Google and some of the other partners in the ecosystem in the [00:12:00] summer.

[00:12:00] We submitted those results directly to the Competitive Markets Authority, which is a regulatory authority and many other authorities, which I don't have them from the top of my head. So they absolutely are going to the review of the results and whether these technologies work, because you have to think about it from both ways, right? 

[00:12:22] We have a thriving open web ecosystem today, where people are able to advertise, people are able to merchandise their products. There are several e-commerce and Direct-to-Consumer businesses. The Competitive Markets Authority and these regulatory bodies, they don't want that open web and the GDP in the economy to just tank there, right?

[00:12:46] They want a thriving web ecosystem. But they want the right degree of regulation so that there is no compromising on data privacy. So, I think it's kind of dichotomous like you were calling out, but I think [00:13:00] it is doable. Yes, and we feel proud of the work we have done with many of the other ecosystem players there.

[00:13:05] Obviously this platform is built for the B2B. Is there a particular size organization that is best suited to leverage your solutions at NextRoll? Is it broken down like, "Hey, if you have a minimum of 10,000 contacts you're reaching out to, come call us." Or is like, "No, you got to be at least a million contacts before you seeing the benefits?" And then are you in terms of ROI, is it more of a top of the funnel visibility? You're trying to help people get brand awareness. Or do you see the solution really helping people drive to a click to call or some sort of action ultimately end?

[00:13:39] Yep, absolutely. So, I will answer this in three stages. So, I introduce myself as the Chief business Officer for NextRoll. And NextRoll has two product lines. And they're all built, purpose built. One is AdRoll, which is for Direct-to-Consumer businesses, which is Vibhor as the [00:14:00] audience for a guitar. But we also have a product line called RollWorks, which is where we have the very strong bi-directional integration with HubSpot, which is built for Vibhor as the buyer of a web analytics tool, as an example.

[00:14:16] So, we have technologies and platforms for both, but specifically for RollWorks, where we have people who want to find accounts that they can engage with, there we work best with mid- to mid-size and above customers. Now you will say, 

[00:14:35] what is "mid-size and above mean? I feel that if you're really starting up, and you don't have enough web traffic, or if you don't have enough engagement on your web platform and you're just starting up, right? It may be just too soon for you to get into account based marketing and advertising. 

[00:14:55] So I really feel that having a [00:15:00] medium level of maturity in your business and marketing, and that can vary from industry.

[00:15:05] So I really can't talk in generalities, but if you have a couple of hundred employees and if you have at least on the B2C side 50,000 monthly unique visitors are created. You are starting to get into the zone where you should think about multi-channel marketing and full funnel marketing, 

[00:15:25] which is where it comes to your second question.

[00:15:27] Multi-channel is, "Hey, am I advertising on social, on web and some of the new medium?" Full funnel is, am I engaging them early in their journey and late in their journey, right? Thinking about the full funnel. And we actually engage at both levels. So if you see our advertising capability, we think about Brand Awareness. And Brand Awareness is certainly upper funnel. So we can help customers with that, but we can also [00:16:00] help customers with retargeting, which is where it starts to get into the lower funnel.

[00:16:04] So, yeah, really a full funnel multichannel platform. And I think one of the questions you asked earlier is, do customers create their own ads? Do they create their own content? We certainly partner with them. There is some services that we offer in terms of creating the advertising for them.

[00:16:25] But a lot of the customers also do it themselves. So it just works depending on how the customers want to work with us.

[00:16:32] Interesting. Well, let's actually talk a little bit more about your integration with HubSpot. So let's say you're a HubSpot customer. You want to start marketing to your audience, your B2B. How does this integration work? We talked briefly about this really two way integration, both taking the data and putting the data back in.

[00:16:48] But what does this integration look like? How do people get started? And really, how long does it take to get going? 

[00:16:54] Those are great questions. We actually have some fantastic content on the HubSpot site on [00:17:00] this as well. But as I call, there is often two ways that you can go and build an integration. You can either take an existing integration with another CRM player in the market. And then redo it or modify or evolve it for a platform.

[00:17:19] We did not take that. We actually purpose built the HubSpot integration. We often hear feedback that the time to value is really, really less. It's very easy to use, but at the most fundamental level, what you're doing is you're taking your contact and account lists, and you are syncing that data and your deal data into RollWorks.

[00:17:46] And once you've done that, what you're doing is RollWorks does this magic. Go back to that identity graph we were talking about, right? We're going to do a matching of what we have in our identity [00:18:00] graph with the account and contact lists and deal data that you have loaded. And once we have done that, the magic will say, "Okay. I see that there is a set of accounts that are in-market and we prioritize them based on the criteria that you provide. So that's one way, right? And now what you've done is you've basically identified high propensity accounts. What's going to do next? You work on an advertising campaign and an advertising strategy.

[00:18:34] That's where you may say, "Hey, I want to target these accounts and here is my primary message to them. And that's where the other magic comes, where we have an advertising platform where we can activate your advertising." Now, that's not where we end.

[00:18:50] Okay. And now, is that done in HubSpot? Like, are you creating the actual ads in HubSpot, just being pushed to the platform, or is this all done outside of HubSpot?[00:19:00] 

[00:19:00] You're actually creating the advertising and the campaigns inside of RollWorks.

[00:19:06] Okay.

[00:19:07] And what you get back in HubSpot is sales insights because, yes, you will drive your advertising campaign and you will see some degree of engagement on that. You will see clicks, you may see impressions, you may see some accounts that have spiking activity.

[00:19:25] For example, you may have a customer from your account in the target list that's going to a review site that's reading an article about you, right? We can take those signals of spike activity and surface it in a widget inside of HubSpot. That's the other side. That's the other thing that we get raving reviews from our customers on, which is that they are in HubSpot and they can gather the sales insights on account spike or event data.

[00:19:55] And they get automated notifications that these accounts are spiking. [00:20:00] Why that matters? Because often in sales and marketing teams, the priority list of what to work on is different right? So this is fantastic for sales marketing alignment. 

[00:20:11] That all goes into the scoring mechanisms say, "Hey, listen, you have these number of accounts. Maybe you have a thousand that you've been assigned to, but really you only have enough time to reach out to 50, and it's like you've identified these are your 50 top and these are potentially the contacts that have been interacting the most." And so enabling the sales team to better target their time and energy.

[00:20:31] Yes, absolutely. We have some really amazing customers. We have one that is a Midmarket ERP company. They're called Acumatica and they use our platform exactly for this purpose, which is they're working with the HubSpot integration.

[00:20:48] That explains a lot for seeing all their ads all the time. I mean, we've had to build some integrations. I they've identified me. They're like, "Hey, look at this guy over here. I'm gonna be marketing to him now." Now I know where it all came [00:21:00] from.

[00:21:00] You can, you can blame that.

[00:21:01] So kind of switching a little bit topics here. Obviously AI, everyone's talking about it. And...

[00:21:06] I don't know anything about AI.

[00:21:08] I mean, who, yeah. Who wants to talk about AI these days? Heck, are we even real? Are we just like fictional on the screen? But yeah, let's talk a little bit about AI. Because I think you had mentioned in a previous conversation that for you... AI, you've been working on that for a decade.

[00:21:22] And so I think may have a different perspective on AI than most other organizations. So, how does AI fit in where you are today and then where you're headed into the future?

[00:21:33] Absolutely. Happy to talk. Happy to talk about that. Yeah. Certainly AI has been much more in conversation now than it was and even when I came here four years back, rather three years back, I was like, "Okay, we should, we need to be talking more about this." But this was just not part of the conversation. It was just getting warmed up. So it's really no secret that, you know, in, as it comes to account based marketing, our strength is in advertising. So very valuable to go back [00:22:00] to a little bit to our history. A lot of this is based on what I was saying, audience data and the foundation that we have built with the cross device graph.

[00:22:10] Now you have data, you have an identity graph, but where does AI come in this? AI comes in because you have over a billion user profiles and then now you have the data and the billion profiles. And it gives you the ability to predict what's going to happen in terms of User Behavior. Now, remember we talked about spiking activity and intense signals that we track.

[00:22:39] We do more predictions on an everyday basis than the New York Stock Exchange. And that is because of the billions of data points that we are processing. And I should say trillions of data points we are processing and the billions of profiles that we have. We have two fundamental building [00:23:00] blocks in our AI tech.

[00:23:02] One is called inIQ. It's basically InsightsIQ. And what we are basically doing here is we take the data that you load into our platform, we map it to the identity graph, we gather firmographic information, technographic information. So that's the InIQ You're processing billions and trillions of data points and you're making a prediction in terms of "Hey, this is the contact and this is the account that is having activity. High intent activity. And that's what InIQ does. Now that's in terms of insights. That's not where we stop. We also have something called BidIQ.

[00:23:46] Now this is where it goes into the depth of advertising tech. If you know how advertising works, what advertising tech requires you to do is take the customer's budget [00:24:00] and be able to do a great job of delivering the ROI on it. How do you do that? You do that by optimizing where you place the ad. What's the size of the bid? What's the price of the bid? You're doing that on the open web. That's what real-time bidding is and we have built the algorithm for BidIQ as a homegrown algorithm. It is not third party tech. It's not somebody else's large language model. It is our own model that we have built and we are able to make predictions about. And do optimizations on ad, budget, pacing, the price at which we bid.

[00:24:41] So collectively, BidIQ and InIQ are fundamental components of our platform. And this has been existent for the last dozen years.

[00:24:52] I mean, it's huge. I mean, we help companies set up, for example, HubSpot. We implemented. We go through, but we're very familiar with the marketing agency world where [00:25:00] part of it is to optimize that spend, I think is the right word.

[00:25:03] And how do you best do it? And everyone has a secret sauce and some people's secret sauce is better than others. And I do agree that AI was the initial, y'all. I mean, that's, that's really kind of where it all began, was optimizing spend, ultimately in the end. And it sounds like you guys have developed a secret sauce to help organizations optimize the placement, the time, the spend, the amount, the bid.

[00:25:25] And there's so many, to your point, variables that go into how do we get the most maximum out of that budget versus me just going to Washington Post be like, "Buy a thousand display ads today, a cost per this amount of impressions." That's brilliant. So, so where is NextRoll headed in this future?

[00:25:41] Like, what's the next, well, no pun intended, I guess, pun intended. 

[00:25:45] I think that, that's a great question. So of course, in the Post Third-Party Cookie World, you have to continue to invest in your data assets. So that your BidIQ and InIQ continue to stay highly [00:26:00] performant. That's an area of our emphasis. And we continue to invest in alternative identifying technologies with our partners and enrich our identity graph so that even in the post-3PC world we are able to do a great job of delivering insights and driving advertising.

[00:26:20] But that's not where we're stopping. A lot of the recent conversation has been on the Generative AI. And, you know, the world of marketing has gotten more and more complex because you have more channels to advertise on, you have more campaigns, and when you're growing, you're going into hyper personalization, which means there are more and more segments for you to go market in.

[00:26:46] Now, think about a Performance Marketer. They have so many insights to gather and then they have to often optimize their campaigns, whether I should invest here or there. That's [00:27:00] where we think chatbots, copilots, and agentic technology can really be helpful for a marketer. A Performance Marketer that can get an easy summarization of which campaigns are most performing and what recommendations they should implement. That's kind of the direction where we are heading, where you really have a partner in your marketing which can help you draw these insights in a more you know, coherent manner, and act on the recommendation.

[00:27:37] So that's kind of the direction we're heading, which is continue to strengthen our data capability in the post-3PC world. Stay high performing in terms of for advertising. But also make sure that. We're helping marketers really elevate their impact with AI in this really noisy world that we are in.

[00:27:56] I probably had the most important question last. One, what is your favorite [00:28:00] protein bar? And two, what happens to that company?

[00:28:02] I do not know what happened to that company. So, unfortunately but I do know that both of our Founders and their highest partner, they continue to be innovative and entrepreneurial and they have done really amazing things with professionally and with their career and for the community.

[00:28:22] What is my favorite protein bar? 

[00:28:25] And, and now is a joke of a question. I wasn't sure if that's like when you hired, the very first thing they ask you is like, "Sir, your fantastic today, guide you to the end of the interview..."

[00:28:35] I just, I just, I just believe in eating a bunch of nuts. 

[00:28:38] There you go. And they still hired you. They still hired you with that question. They built this business and you say, "I just, I'm happy with a packet of nuts. You know, give me some pistachios and I'm good to go at this point."

[00:28:51] Yep. Yep.

[00:28:52] Vibhor, it's been absolutely fantastic to have you on the show.

[00:28:55] Listeners. If you've heard. I think today you've gone more of insight into how this [00:29:00] works in terms of this programmatic advertising, account based marketing. If you're a B2B organization out there, you have HubSpot, you want to target your customers. This is a fantastic tool to say, "Hey, let me go ahead and reach them," especially if you're in the mid market range or above.

[00:29:13] If you're targeting them because your sales team needs that additional support, both at the top of the funnel, all the way through the bottom of the funnel to when they're actually making that purchase. Sometimes it's referred to as air cover. So especially as you're out there, you need to provide air cover and if you're not doing that already, by all means, start doing that today.

[00:29:29] And one last question. How can people find out more information about you and how can they find out more information about the company?

[00:29:37] Yep. Absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn. And I'm very active on LinkedIn. Happy to take messages as well as have a open dialogue. But you can go to rollworks.com. R-O-L-L works. com. You can also go to adroll.com, A-D-R-O-L-L. com. You'll [00:30:00] find our integrations. You'll find lots of great content. Both video and otherwise in terms of getting started. So, yeah, hit our website. Hit me on LinkedIn.

[00:30:10] Awesome. Thank you. 

[00:30:12] ​