Aaron Bell

Overview

Aaron Bell is the engineer-founder who built AdRoll from a display advertising network into the company synonymous with retargeting, and then stepped aside from its chief executive role to run product instead. Before becoming CEO of his own company, Bell was programming and creating video-game software that was sold and distributed nationally when he was 12, and three years later became the youngest software engineer ever to be hired by Microsoft, according to SBN’s award profile (SBN). At Stanford University he studied artificial intelligence, started a Facebook-type website that was shut down by the university, and worked with NASA to lead and design schedulers for manned space flight missions (SBN). He founded AdRoll in 2007 with Adam Berke as president, and served as its CEO until Toby Gabriner succeeded him in 2017 (AdExchanger; MRWeb).

An engineer’s answer to display advertising

Bell’s founding idea, as he told AdExchanger in 2012, was disarmingly simple: display advertising should work for everyone the way Google had scaled AdWords for advertisers large and small, but no one had done the same thing in display (AdExchanger). In 2007 display was split between the biggest named brands buying premium placements on rate cards, with no performance element at all, and direct-response advertisers carpet-bombing the web with crude banners — dancing aliens, home mortgages, teeth whitening — that gave banners a bad name (AdExchanger). Bell’s answer was to stick to his guns and work hard on scaling display itself, building proprietary technology in-house rather than integrating third-party software, so that AdRoll’s retargeting tools were more robust than its competitors’ (SBN).

The timing tested that conviction immediately. AdRoll closed its Series A in August 2008, weeks before the Lehman Brothers collapse, and the founders responded to the crash by focusing on product rather than sales, asking their few customers what they would spend money on in a bad economy — and hearing, always, ROI (AdExchanger). The rise of ad exchanges around 2008–2009 was the unlock: AdRoll became one of the first buyers on Google’s AdEx, built a self-service software-as-a-service platform, and grew fast — 5,000 customers adding 500 a month, 85 employees in San Francisco, profitable since 2011 with north of 400% growth, backed by Accel and angel investor Peter Thiel (VC News Daily).

Transparency was Bell’s product philosophy made visible. Online display advertising was usually purchased by cost per ad impression served, and in an effort to make sure the company could report the websites on which clients’ ads were placed and the cost of each placement, AdRoll charged a 30 percent margin on top of the cost of each impression — unlike competitors who placed ads on spam or low-quality websites with high chances of accidental clicks but little chance of reaching a client’s customers (SBN). It was during difficult economic times that Bell founded AdRoll, SBN noted, but he stuck with it through years of slow growth while he struggled to generate profit, taking time to understand customer needs and creating a transparent product with a high return on investment that customers, in SBN’s phrase, simply could not say no to (SBN).

From CEO to chief product officer

Bell’s move out of the CEO role was a handover, not an exit. In 2017 AdRoll promoted Toby Gabriner to CEO, replacing co-founder Bell, who moved to the full-time post of chief product officer, overseeing engineering, product, user experience, data science, and supply (MRWeb). Bell framed it as a partnership: he and Gabriner had forged a remarkable partnership over the previous twelve months, and he looked forward to continuing the work they had begun in their new roles, drawing on his passion for innovation to take AdRoll to new heights (MRWeb). The following year, when AdRoll split into RollWorks and the legacy AdRoll business under the AdRoll Group, Bell, as co-founder and chief of product, led innovation and product development for the group (AdExchanger). The engineer who had started by writing games at twelve ended up, fittingly, back where he started: building the product.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not present SBN’s “youngest Microsoft engineer ever” superlative as independently corroborated fact; it is attributed to SBN. It does not upgrade Bell’s Ernst & Young recognition from finalist to winner. It does not give a birth date or place, Stanford degree details, or any post-2018 role for Bell, because none appear in the sources read in full. And it does not claim Bell founded AdRoll alone: the founding, in every source read, is Bell’s with Berke as co-founder and president.