AdRoll becomes NextRoll and launches new platform services business

The AdRoll Group has a new name — NextRoll — designed to reflect the company’s moves beyond ad retargeting.

“We have, for the longest time, been pigeonholed as a retargeting company, but the reality is that we have really been evolving,” CEO Toby Gabriner told me.

To be clear, the AdRoll retargeting business isn’t going away. But the company subsequently introduced RollWorks, which offers business-to-business marketing tools, and today it’s launching a third unit, NextRoll Platform Services.

Gabriner became CEO of AdRoll in November 2017, and he said the rebrand has been in the works for a while now. When the company launched the RollWorks product last year, both business units continued to operate under The AdRoll Group umbrella, but Gabriner said that was always “a temporary placeholder.”

He added, “We’re now a year and a half into the RollWorks brand launch and it’s firmly planted on its own two feet. It makes a ton of sense for us to move onto onto the NextRoll brand. This was always planned.”

As for how NextRoll Platform Services fits into that strategy, the company describes as a “marketing-technology-as-a-service offering.” Granier explained that it provides access to AdRoll’s underlying technologies through APIs, allowing businesses bring these capabilities into other ad products, or to resell them as part of their own platforms.

The initial offerings are Channels-As-A-Service, which allows businesses to extend their marketing to new channels, and Audiences-As-A-Service, which turns audience data into targetable segments.

“This is something we’ve been pulled by a lot of customers to do,” Gabriner said. “What we’ve been doing over the last couple of years is externalizing those services so people outside of the company. developers, would have an easier time using them. [Now we’ve] gone that last mile of making them commercially friendly.”