Winners Spotlight: AdRoll

December 11 | Advertising Technology 2024 Winner

AdRoll, a leader in digital advertising, won the 2024 Global Tech Award in Advertising Technology for helping 140,000+ businesses grow revenue. With 16+ years of expertise, they leverage machine learning to optimize display and social ad performance. Check out their journey!

What motivated your company to participate in the Global Tech Awards?

Our participation in the Global Tech Awards was driven by our mission: empowering brands to achieve revenue growth through an optimized marketing platform. The awards allowed us to showcase our services and connect with other forward-thinking tech organizations. By applying, we aimed to highlight the impact of our platform, which has helped over 140,000 businesses achieve measurable success.

Could you share an overview of the project or innovation your company submitted?

Our submission featured our digital advertising platform and its significant impact on the adtech industry. The platform’s key features include automation capabilities, Google Search Integration, and partnerships with Improvado and WooCommerce. We also mentioned specific clients who achieved marketing success with our platform, such as Yoga Democracy, a sustainable activewear brand, and TMGM, a financial trading platform. Within our submission, we highlighted our notable reach and influence in the adtech industry, exemplified by our ability to help clients generate over $246 billion in sales annually. Our platform provides a seamless user experience, enhancing marketers’ confidence. We also emphasized our commitment to industry collaboration, particularly with Google, as our parent company, NextRoll, is a market testing grantee for Google’s Privacy Sandbox, an initiative focused on prioritizing privacy among Google Chrome users.

How has your team worked together to bring this innovation to life?

We support brands with strategic and creative guidance. As a remote-friendly company, our teams collaborate across departments to enhance the platform. Every team member plays a crucial role in helping brands properly communicate their values and better understand their audiences for growth.

What impact do you anticipate your innovation will have on the tech industry or society at large?

Our work on Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative is poised to transform the industry by advancing privacy-forward advertising practices. As third-party cookies are phased out, the digital advertising ecosystem must balance privacy with the needs of marketers and publishers. Through rigorous API testing, we’ve demonstrated that private, targeted advertising is both possible and scalable with the right improvements. This innovation can reshape how businesses engage with consumers online, fostering trust through user privacy. It also supports the open web, ensuring that publishers—especially smaller and independent ones—continue to thrive in a more privacy-conscious digital environment. By actively collaborating with Google and our partners, we’re creating a roadmap for privacy-preserving solutions that we believe will set a global standard for ethical, effective digital advertising. This shift empowers users with greater control over their data while still enabling personalized content. It shows that privacy and performance can coexist, fostering a healthier digital ecosystem that respects consumer rights and drives innovation.

Are there any specific challenges you faced during the development process, and how did you overcome them?

Testing Google’s Privacy Sandbox presented unique challenges, which we approached with a solutions-oriented mindset. One of the primary difficulties was addressing the lower performance of the cookieless Protected Audience API (PAAPI) compared to our existing third-party cookie-based system. For example, we observed a 3x higher CPM and 2x higher CPC in campaigns using the Privacy Sandbox APIs. These results were primarily driven by low publisher adoption of the APIs, which limited available ad inventory and negatively impacted campaign performance. To overcome this, we modified our pacing mechanism to bid more aggressively, even at higher costs, to ensure we gathered sufficient data to learn from. Additionally, we maintained open channels with Google and our partners to share our findings and recommendations, such as increasing publisher adoption rates and extending the duration of interest groups to improve audience size and campaign performance. Another hurdle was the increased latency in bidding processes, which affected user experience and, consequently, publisher adoption. By closely monitoring this issue, we identified opportunities for latency reduction and shared actionable insights with stakeholders to prioritize improvements in future iterations. These challenges underscore the iterative nature of developing innovative, privacy-forward advertising technologies. While there’s still work to do, our results affirm the potential for private advertising solutions and guide our continued collaboration with Google and the broader adtech community to refine and improve these systems.

How does your company foster a culture of innovation?

We foster a culture of innovation through a deeply ingrained test-and-learn philosophy that empowers every aspect of our business. This approach prioritizes experimentation, data-driven decision-making, and continuous improvement. By encouraging our teams to test rigorously and analyze outcomes, we create an environment where innovation thrives. We’ve also invested in robust systems and tools that enable controlled, scalable testing of new features in real-world environments with minimal risk. This allows us to iterate quickly, ensuring product quality and accelerating the release of impactful solutions. Our test-and-learn philosophy has positioned us as leaders in tackling industry challenges, such as the deprecation of third-party cookies, by enabling rapid development and deployment of privacy-forward solutions. This approach ensures we remain at the forefront of innovation, delivering results that keep our customers ahead of their competitors.

What advice would you give to other companies striving to make an impact in the tech space?

If you want to make an impact in the tech space, you must learn to be adaptable. Learning in a fast-paced environment and effectively applying that knowledge is crucial to achieving success in tech. The tech space is rapidly evolving, forcing those operating within to be remarkably flexible. By doing so, tech leaders can drive professional growth and establish more future-proof strategies.

What are your company’s future goals, and how do you plan to drive advancements in your industry?

Our company’s future goals focus on advancing privacy-first advertising and harnessing AI to deliver meaningful, tailored solutions. We’re engaged in Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, conducting rigorous testing to develop technologies that balance user privacy with effective advertising. This reflects our long-standing commitment to creating a more private web while empowering marketers with tools to grow their businesses responsibly.

Are there any emerging technologies or trends your company is particularly excited about?

At AdRoll, we’re excited about AI’s potential beyond the hype. While many companies are adopting generative AI features as quick wins, we believe the real value lies in thoughtful, strategic integration rooted in proprietary data and custom solutions. We’ve been harnessing machine learning to refine our bidding and insights platforms for nearly two decades. This approach has allowed us to build systems that leverage unique data sets to train models tailored to our goals, delivering sustainable advantages. Emerging trends like generative AI are exciting, but we’re focused on using AI to address core business challenges rather than following trends. By blending curated data, bespoke AI applications, and strategic foresight, we’re ensuring our platforms deliver long-term value, not just short-term novelty. For us, AI’s future is about creating meaningful, differentiated solutions that grow with our customers.

To dive deeper into AdRoll’s award-winning work, visit their website at https://www.adroll.com

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