On behalf of AdRoll Group, I’m thrilled to share that Mike Stocker has recently joined us as vice president of strategic partnerships for the RollWorks business unit. Mike brings a wealth of experience in adtech, martech, and business development from his time at Facebook, Marketo, and Vidyard, among others. As part of the RollWorks leadership team, Mike will continue to build and strengthen our partnerships within the martech industry and drive RollWorks adoption within various ecosystems.
I first had the pleasure of working with Mike at Marketo, where we collaborated to build the company’s partner ecosystem. To help you get to know him as well as I do, we cornered him in a room and peppered him with questions. Here’s what he had to say:
Q: You’ve worked with some of the biggest players in the martech space, both in-house and as a partner manager. What is it about the industry that keeps you coming back for more?
A: Early in my career, I was a media buyer spending several million dollars per month on digital advertising. That experience inspired me to find technology that would improve the process, drive better performance, improve ROI, and ultimately deliver a better end-customer experience. I’ve always asked myself—how can we serve the right ad to the right person at the right time? When I joined Marketo, I was working with some of the best B2B marketers out there. And even though they were the leaders in the field, many of them weren’t leveraging their data to improve their digital advertising. Martech was the domain of email marketing and adtech was the domain of advertising—and the two were generally siloed and separate. I was an early proponent of forging partnerships between martech and adtech to allow marketers to leverage that data. Marrying these areas drove big impact, improved ROI/ROAS for advertisers, and delivered a better view of the customer journey, from impression through purchase and throughout the lifecycle.
Q: While at Marketo and most recently at Facebook, you built and nurtured strategic tech partnerships—what did you learn during that time that you’ll bring with you to RollWorks?
A: I learned that companies can add tremendous value for their customers by developing partnerships. Today, the average marketer’s technology stack is getting more and more complex. They need their core technology platforms (CRM, marketing automation, advertising, etc.) to work together and allow their data to flow seamlessly. That’s the only way B2B marketers will be able to continue improving account engagement, reporting better analytics, and measuring their revenue impact. All the different components of a marketer’s tech stack provide rich data “signals” that can help determine the right people to target, the right messaging to send, the best engagement channel, and the optimal timing to meet their engagement and growth goals. RollWorks offers marketers best in class performance, and while it’s early days, it’s well positioned to integrate and partner with many other of the key leaders in the martech industry to deliver on the promise of ABM.
Q: What do you hope to accomplish in your first year at RollWorks?
A: It’s only week two, but I’d like to deepen RollWorks’s partnerships with a few of the key leading components of a marketer’s tech stack—think Salesforce, HubSpot, Adobe/Marketo. Additionally, I’d like to broaden RollWorks’s position to become a valued partner to the major advertising platforms: Linkedin, Facebook, and others. I’m a big proponent of demonstrating the value from partnerships, so it would also be ideal to have several strong customer success stories that highlight our collaboration with these strategic partners. Lastly, I’d like to accelerate our progress enabling agencies and others to advocate on the benefits of working with RollWorks.
Q: What excites you about RollWorks? Why did you choose to join us?
A: A couple things. One, a product that is robust, continually improving, and already driving strong value for hundreds of customers. Two, an exceptionally strong leadership team and impressive, dedicated employees in all functional areas.
Q: You have a really interesting background, including founding three companies and being an angel investor in two. Tell us about your background as an entrepreneur and what lessons from those experiences you’ll bring to RollWorks.
A: I love the act of “building”. That could be building a small company, a team, a product, an integration, or a partnership—or a combination of all of the above. I think by being an entrepreneur, you learn to wear many different “hats” across functions. You have a lean and scrappy approach, always looking for ways to continually optimize and drive efficiencies. Another important aspect is that you learn to take ownership and responsibility; I enjoy taking “ownership” of the things I build. At Marketo, I owned strategic advertising partnerships but sat in the product team next to our CTO and vice president of product.- It gave me the ability to represent a partner mindset within the product organization. Even at a huge company like Facebook, I was able to extend my role outside the standard enterprise partner manager position. With an eye towards being more expansive, I worked on co-marketing and provided a bridge between partner product teams and internal product teams like Lead Ads, Custom Audiences, Pixel, and Offline Conversions. I hope to bring this experience to RollWorks to expand strategic partnerships as a driver of more robust solutions, improved market positioning, and business growth.
Q: Enough about work. What do you like to do for fun outside of the office?
A: I enjoy traveling. I’ve been to far-flung places like Argentina (walking on glaciers!) and Tanzania, Kenya, and Zanzibar on an African safari. I just returned from a trip to Bordeaux, France, which introduces my second hobby, drinking wine. I love heading up to Napa, Dundee in Oregon, Anderson Valley, Paso Robles, and Santa Barbara to go wine tasting. I also love photography, check out www.mstocker.com, I collect/hoard shoes; I have 100+ pairs of sneakers. Lastly, I love spending time with my two dogs, Ewok, who’s a shih-tzu, and Lucy, my old dachshund.
Q: What’s your favorite TV show, and why?
A: I like Check Please! Bay Area on PBS. It helps me find new restaurants to check out.
Q: Read any good books lately?
A: OK, I’m a history major and pretty nerdy that way. So I recently read George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century, which attempted to predict big trends that we might see in the next century. And despite it being written in 2009, some of his predictions are already coming true now. Things like an aging population, record low unemployment, and China and Russia getting closer to each other. A fascinating read!
Thank you and welcome aboard, Mike. We’re excited to have you!
Interested in joining our team? View our open positions here.
Michael Stocker is the vice president of strategic partnerships for the RollWorks business unit, a division of AdRoll Group. He comes to us from Facebook, where he managed global partnerships with companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zapier, among others. Prior to Facebook, Mike was VP of Business Development at Vidyard and Sr. Director of Business Development at Marketo. Earlier in his career, Mike was a media buyer working at early pioneers like Right Media. He has also successfully founded and sold a few small technology and marketing startups.
About the Author
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