AI-Native Ad Platforms

Guy: [: 00:00:00

Marketing machine.pro relevant.com. Today I'm interviewing Viv Ho Kapo and he's the CMO, uh, and Chief Business Officer at Next Roll. And he is, uh, leading products and partnerships and marketing and revenue for the company's B2B role works and B2C. Ad role product lines with over 30 years of experience in SaaS and cloud pat platforms.

dobe Box and Microsoft. Wow. [: 00:01:00

Vibhor: Yep, absolutely. Excited to be here and thanks for such a generous introduction. Yeah, I owe it a lot to all of those. Organizations in terms of the experiences I've had?

Guy: Yeah, exactly. With, uh, although I don't know, I've got 30 years experience too, and I, I always just say, well, more than 15 years, 'cause the number is getting bigger and bigger.

So I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Vibhor: I think it's a little bit of both, but it keeps you up to say, wow, I've. Spent so many years, I've better have a good perspective in terms of where the world is heading and, uh, looking forward to our conversation today.

Guy: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I, I'm, I'm, uh, me too, and I know you're gonna have a great, uh, perspective.

So before we get started, uh, what is your backstory on how you got involved in AI and got into marketing?

ations. Uh, and I spent time [: 00:02:00

So, um, I had a pretty significant career pivot and I decided that I'm gonna invest my career in marketing. And, you know, you go through these kind of inflection points several times in your career and I remember coming out and saying, okay, I think marketing is gonna be, I. Perfect balance of data, analytics, creativity, and driving business growth.

d say I got really deep into [: 00:03:00

Uh, we did not have this term in those days. I'm going almost a decade back, and this was mostly a concept and I led a Skunk Works effort inside of Microsoft where the idea was, Hey, how do you get. Intelligent, uh, intense signals from every activity that an account or a contact is having, and how do you bring it together and analyze it, understand it, and be able to do a better job of bringing relevant messages.

To your customers and to your audiences, whether you are trying to expand them or whether you're trying to acquire them. That was my big breakthrough moment where I said, wow, and I actually had data scientists on my team. So I would say that was my second inflection point as it comes to the backstory of marketing and ai.

Guy: Yeah. And that, uh, [: 00:04:00

Yeah. So tell us about next role. What's going on there?

Vibhor: Yep. Absolutely. Happy to do that. So, a, as a first, you know, next role is a marketing and advertising company. Uh, what we do is we work with performance marketers using an advertising technology, and our primary goal is to help them drive sustainable growth.

And I think one of the things we take a ton of pride in is we want to do it in a way that you build trust with your audiences. So trust is a very core principle for us as we help marketers go drive growth. Now, uh, we've been around for about 15 years and we have two different product lines. We have agile.

hich is where, let's say you [: 00:05:00

And that's where, you know, you have a buying committee, you have an account, you have different contacts within an account that you're trying to engage. And this might be a technology company. You might be an industrial automation company where you know you're really buying something. On behalf of your business.

ourselves is a full funnel. [: 00:06:00

So that's what we are at our core.

Guy: Fantastic and that complexity. And, uh, and it seems to be getting, maybe not, not necessarily complex from a channel type perspective, but certainly there's so many CTV channels and then there's so many, you know, digital and social, and then the, uh, potential changes with TikTok and what have you, uh, makes a lot of sense.

And you need a software that can support you across all those channels. Uh, so how is AI gonna be, uh, working with you guys? How are you integrating that into, uh, into what you're doing?

say, Hey, how do I integrate [: 00:07:00

But I'd like to believe that we are AI native. We are AI first. And I'll share a little bit more detail in terms of what do I mean by that. We started about 15 years back. And over the last 15 years, we have collected a lot of data about user behavior and we've done it in a privacy forward manner. This is data that's based on cookies.

This is based on first party data, and this is based on other identifiers. And what we do is we take the power of that data and we use that for driving advertising. In driving advertising, you have to be able to. Make predictions as an example. You may come back and say, Hey, I'm trying to look for people like me who like to wear a red sweater and my cost or acquisition or the cost per million impressions.

a bidding algorithm that we [: 00:08:00

So it's really, we did not have to go and integrate AI into it. It, it has AI at the core. Lemme give you some interesting data points we make. I. 150 billion buyer predictions every day. These are predictions to say, Hey, I have a board out there. He's interested in X, Y, or Z topic, and you have a certain performance.

han New York Stock Exchange. [: 00:09:00

It's more about how do I take it to the next level? That's where we are spending a lot of our time. So I kind of think about us as, eh, we are our ai. It's about taking the next step with all these advancements that we have had with large language models and generated ai.

Guy: Yeah. And these, uh, you know, it is amazing what you can do with them and how that can, uh, you know, really get down to kind of the next level of capability.

You know, you have analytic AI or machine learning, and that gets you, you know, incredibly far. And, uh, uh, but then now to take the, uh, large language models and really be able to, uh. Take all of your activities to the next level. So, uh, how do you see then AI in playing a role in overall marketing strategy and, and you know, certainly cross channel, uh, activities and attribution and then even, you know, of course, optimizing our campaign performance.

Vibhor: Yep, [: 00:10:00

So at least paint a picture of what could be possible. So today we already have core technologies in our platform. One of them, I was mentioning briefly earlier, but maybe a little bit more color. We have something called BID iq. What Bid IQ does is looks at billions of bid requests and make, you know, precise, impactful predictions about impressions that we want to deliver for our customers.

th smaller data sets because [: 00:11:00

So BID IQ is a bidding technology, which we've built over the last 15 years. In the last couple of years, I should say, in the last five years. We've also built. What we call in iq, it's basically Insights iq. And what we do here is we gather intense signals and in-market data specifically for a B2B customers where let's say someone is demonstrating intent by being in a review site, by being in a certain product page.

And what we do is we take those intense signals. And we try to accelerate the engagement with that account. So we already have solved those problems, gathering intent data and doing, uh, you know, using machine learning and AI in our bidding technology. Now, okay, with that as the baseline, you'd say, okay, where is the world headed next?

k for analogies because they [: 00:12:00

Uh, or maybe you're talking about an automated system which has sensors, which helps you not steer away from your lane or maybe be able to do a level of park assist. So today, when I see a lot of the technology that is being embraced, it seems to be in that realm, right? You are really in a co-pilot or an assist mode where you are.

s dashboard today, they have [: 00:13:00

Humanly very hard for you to understand, which, how do you do budget shifts? Which campaigns are performing, right? So I think where we are today is, Hey, what's my best performing campaign? And that's sort of low autonomy, human assisted, co-pilot, life and experience. And a lot of the industry players are really building that, and that's fantastic.

publication on, on a digital [: 00:14:00

And I think that's the other end of the spectrum. I compare that to a world where you are, your tools, your marketing and advertising tools are able to autonomously make decisions, which is. I've seen that you have low reach relative to the size of the audience on campaign A, and you are hitting your cost per acquisition goal.

you have to saying, I think [: 00:15:00

To a state where you're saying, I already know based on historical data, predictive trends. That this campaign is going to perform better and there is enough reach and let me shift the budget for you. So I think that's the progression I see in our world as it comes to marketing and advertising. And I think it's gonna be really relevant in cross channel marketing, uh, which is what we take a lot of pride in, which give, uh, our customers the ability.

To be able to see performance of their campaigns and be able to attribute the impact that they have across each channel. And that's a critical input into making those decisions, right? You don't want to shift budget from one channel to the other till you understand the attribution. So it's kind of, that's the holy grail that we are driving towards.

I mean, you know, humans can [: 00:16:00

Vibhor: Absolutely. And again, that's one thing we work very closely with our customers on, depending on what's your level of awareness in the market, your marketing mix might be very different if it's a product or a service that you have where you are. Early in the market or the market is nascent, your marketing mix is gonna be more leaning into upper funnel, like marketing fundamentals, right?

t's another, uh, opportunity [: 00:17:00

If you think about. The world, which is where we will have less cookie based, uh, tracking. In the future. You need to build technologies where you can understand audience behavior based on the context of where we are. So for upper funnels specifically, we have contextual targeting and what we do is we use natural language processing.

oint, but still gives you a. [: 00:18:00

So I think in contextual targeting, we use a lot of natural language processing, and I think that's where a lot of the AI innovation is. And then in, um, lower funnel marketing. Where a lot of remarketing and retargeting happens, you are looking for intense signals. You are looking for enough intense signals.

This is back to in IQ that we were talking about, so that you can progress the user, the buyer, through the journey. So yeah, that's how we think about sort of ai. And progressing the user through the full funnel marketing strategy that I was talking about.

Guy: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And, and certainly ai, you know, it's just, it's just a lot easier, I don't know, easier, but certainly faster and, uh, just better I guess, uh, overall.

ming a client of course, but [: 00:19:00

Vibhor: Uh, yeah, absolutely. I was actually with a customer just recently, I would say less than 24 hours back.

Where they are a technology company and they are trying to reach technology decision makers, and, uh, they've seen a ton of, uh, impact in terms of being able to understand the performance of their campaigns and which channels are driving their campaigns, and being able to use those insights to shift their budgets.

on, and then you are able to [: 00:20:00

I think that's another place where I have customers that are coming to me and saying. Wow. I would love to do that, which is give more relevant advertising on connected tv because today a lot of the connected TV advertising works very much like the 1960s seventies, which is pray and Pray. And I'm not a dog household, I'm not a cat household, but I see so many cat and dog ads when I'm watching streaming tv.

And I wonder like, okay, these are dollars going down the drain. And I think there's so much more, the level of personalization that you have now on web, there's so much opportunity to bring that same level of personalization to connected tv. So that's another area where we're doing a lot of work with our customers where they come and say.

Oh, this is [: 00:21:00

They get delighted with what we are working with them on.

Guy: Yeah. Well, and I think the, uh, probably the best audience though for you is dogs and cats with wearing red sweaters. That right there you would get such good response. It's hard to believe

Vibhor: that is. That is totally true. I do have fun. Family member without naming them and putting them on the spot that is going completely.

They, they, they, they're completely caught. Their Instagram reels are full off, uh, uh, cat content. Uh, yep,

Guy: [: 00:22:00

And, uh, you know, and even though it's kind of stalled, it's kind of halfway there. Apple isn't doing it, but Google is kind of doing it. I, I can't even figure out what's going on. So tell us about what you're doing as it relates to, uh, the impact of potentially losing all of our third party cookies.

Vibhor: Yep, absolutely.

k this divide is, uh, is, is [: 00:23:00

I really think, and, and we've done surveys around this and there are other third party independent surveys around this which say if you provide relevant content, users are willing to share their data about what interests them. So I think it's really about content relevance. And when I say content, I'm talking about a blog post.

I'm talking about an article. I'm talking about this kind of a podcast. I'm talking about a product, right? At the end of the day, you are offering. A relevant message, uh, or a story. And so I really do think that there is value in relevance, but you have to do it in a privacy forward manner. And we were very early in recognizing this and we've been working very closely with Google on this for several years.

we'd like to build the next [: 00:24:00

Understand attribution even when third party cookies go away. So we have, um, and this, a lot of this was spawned by the requests from Competitive Markets Authority and some of the other regulatory authorities. So we've been working with them for the last five years. We actually have our, we have rebuilt our bidding technology, which does not rely on third party cookies.

And is able to engage audiences in a privacy forward manner. We are among the early testers of that technology with Google. In fact, we were one of the only testers in several categories. And we submitted our results to the competitive markets authority, our own results. And uh, so I think we've really taken a lot of future forward steps.

nly when third party cookies [: 00:25:00

Where, uh, you know, we have our homegrown built ML tech and what we also have is our own identity solution and we wanna make sure our identity solution maintains fidelity in the future. So, um, that identity solution now is privacy sandbox ready, third party cookie proof. It's augmented with other identifiers.

e are not stopping there. So [: 00:26:00

But what we are also doing is we are working with other players in the industry. So there are many audience data companies, audience act, and what we are doing is we are working with them in terms of launching products where those audience datas that they are, have. Our third party cookie proof. We in fact just announced earlier, there's a company called Audient and we have just launched an audience activation using the Google Privacy Sandbox technology with them.

hip team, including me, have [: 00:27:00

Guy: Definitely sounds like there's some, uh, interesting, uh, things coming out that way. And, you know, this, uh, the, the Google Privacy Sandbox and, um, and then, you know, the deprecation of third party cookies, uh, you know, that's, that's gotta be a, you know, a big piece of what you're doing. So where do you see then, uh, AI generally fitting into, uh, you know, your future and your client's future as it relates to, you know, really driving the, their campaign performance?

Vibhor: Yep. Absolutely, and maybe I'll just, uh, reframe this a little bit as I respond. I really think if you just step back and you've been in the marketing space for such a long time and you've written amazing content Guy, added score marketing is really about creating content and then communicating that through channels.

we talked a lot today about. [: 00:28:00

And the autonomy at which they optimize those campaigns. That's great. But at the core of it, with another place where the significant innovation is content creation. Right. I'm sure you've had guests who come and talked about all the innovation that's happening in terms of creating content in all formats.

We're talking about imagery, we're talking about video, we're talking about, uh, you know, text-based content, including. Podcasts and any other core content that you have. So I think there is innovation that's gonna happen in that There is innovation certainly at its core in terms of taking the data signals and being able to optimize campaigns as we have talked about.

But [: 00:29:00

Maybe you really are still able to appeal to the heart, mind, and soul of the audience, and I think that's not going away. And that's where I think the marketing world is gonna shift. It's kind of going back to where it was in the pre-digital days, right? So I think that value is gonna get elevated. I also think just at a meta level, the beauty of ai, I.

gone through a cycle in our [: 00:30:00

There are lots of options, and with the fact that no monocultures exist. And we are in a vibrant, diverse world, and the advent of AI is really doing personalization at scale. So for me, what gets me excited on Monday morning, I. Uh, and I work from home, so I would've said other and drive my car 80 miles per hour, not breaking any traffic rules.

It is basically the opportunity with personalization at scale. I think that's unprecedented and I think I will call on all marketing leaders. To, uh, to think that way. And, uh, and hopefully that excites them as much as it does for me.

that, uh, personalization at [: 00:31:00

Is, you know, the AI that you get, that generate, that gets generated, let's say, for an individual still has to be read by somebody or checked by somebody. And that's maybe just the state of the, the technology today, maybe the state of the art, you know, two or three years from now. It, it'll be so good that you'll be able to trust it.

And uh, uh, the other thing though is. And that trust, unfortunately, especially in a regulated industry or you know, like financial or healthcare, you know, you got the lawyers and the lawyers wanna read everything. And, uh, just to make absolutely sure it would seem like somebody, and I don't know, maybe somebody's working on it, is how do you, in order to get that personalization at scale, how do you get the, uh, the legal oversight at scale as well?

about yesterday at this, uh, [: 00:32:00

Vibhor: That's such a great perspective. Uh, I, I absolutely agree with you. I really think that we will be in a human assisted but high autonomous world for a long time and I hadn't gotten a crystal ball and I've been long, many times in my life, uh, like several of us have been. But I do think we'll be in a human assisted mode, and I think that's the power you're creating higher level of autonomy, but you're still having human oversight.

at too, and I think about it [: 00:33:00

You don't want that to become an echo chamber. I don't have a crystal ball or a solution for that, but I would say in terms of the perils, we often talk about biases and certainly in industries which are more sensitive or regulated. And you called out healthcare and fin financial services, so that's a huge challenge.

Don't have a solve for it, but I'm. Almost acknowledging the problem in there.

ting, uh, getting, you know, [: 00:34:00

There's no question. And I actually, yesterday I was, uh, moderating a panel and there was a woman from, uh, marketing and healthcare, and, and they made that mistake. And luckily they were able to, you know, at a. Clawed back in time. And that was all human. I mean, it was AI driven, but it was still human oversight.

Still allowed it to pass through. And uh, so, um, I don't know. So hopefully at some point maybe we'll start to realize that, uh, you know, we don't have to hold technology to that a hundred percent standard.

Vibhor: That's what we do in our next podcast. Have the learnings from it for the next few months, and then.

Revisit that topic. I'll, I I'll give it a, I'll give it a deep thought as well.

bout done, but I do have one [: 00:35:00

Just got outta school and ready to, and raring to go and, and getting their teeth into something really cool.

Vibhor: Yep. Yep. That's great. I would say maybe two things. I'll cheat here if I said one, but I'll say two. I think being very strong in your fundamentals, uh, fundamentals of marketing, if you're getting into marketing is key.

And yes, there is. Fantastic technology, uh, revolution that's happening right now, powered by ai, but build a strong set of fundamentals because they are the core with which you'll think about it. Don't underestimate the value of understanding human psychology and what drives and motivates the brain, because I think that's at the heart of any great storytelling back to what we were saying.

e, which is. And the ability [: 00:36:00

Mm-hmm. Critical to marketing and second build, uh, a great degree of adaptability because change is the only content constant.

Guy: Yeah. Yeah. Let me, uh, push back on you. That change is constant. I, I think that's, uh, slightly untrue. I think change is accelerating. I. Maybe the acceleration of change is constant.

There's kind of like that next level because with ai, oh man, the change just, uh, it's just exploding right in front of our face.

Vibhor: I like that. I really do like that acceleration of change is the only constant. Yeah, I.

uh, think about and, uh, and [: 00:37:00

It's really, uh, you know, some really good insights there and, and you know, it is from marketer's perspective, it is all about how can I do my job better, get higher quality, and then drive more sales. And certainly what you're doing is, uh, it makes a lot of sense. Uh, how can you, uh, uh, how can folks reach out to you and, and, uh, reach you and learn more about you?

And also, of course, next role?

Vibhor: Absolutely. So you can go to agile.com, that's A-D-R-O-L l.com. You can go to role works.com, which is our B2B product line, ROLL works.com. And then I'm, uh, very active on LinkedIn, so please hit me up on LinkedIn and it is basically. Slash uh, I was very early member to sign into LinkedIn, so I didn't have to have any other characters in my name.

So yes, very

n, you make a, you know, you [: 00:38:00

Vibhor: Yeah. I'm not, we work in 93 point hashtag or something.

Guy: Exactly. Exactly. Vi uh, thank you so much.

Really appreciate it. And for the audience, of course, please stay tuned for more videos in this series of the backstory on marketing and ai. And, uh, if you'd like to please go to marketing machine.pro relevant.com and download the, uh, some excerpts on my upcoming book, the AI Marketing Machine. Again, Viv Hor, thank you so much.

Really appreciate it.

Vibhor: Excellent. Looking forward to reading that book too. Thank you guy for having me. Bye now.

Guy: Absolutely. Thank [: 00:39:00