Adam Berke

Overview

Adam Berke is the co-founder and president who, with Aaron Bell, turned AdRoll from an ordinary ad network into the internet’s largest retargeting platform — and who then left after a decade to build a company about the management problem he had watched grow inside AdRoll itself. In AdExchanger’s 2012 interview, Berke is the voice of the pivot: the man who, weeks after AdRoll closed its Series A, watched Lehman Brothers crash and Bear Stearns go under, and decided the company would focus on product instead of expanding sales (AdExchanger). By 2021 he described himself as co-founder and CEO of WorkPatterns, after ten years at AdRoll building it from three people to around 700 employees, with offices in San Francisco, Dublin, London, Sydney, and Tokyo (HackerNoon).

The pivot, in Berke’s own account

Berke’s version of the AdRoll story starts with a question asked in a bad economy. Instead of expanding marketing and sales into the downturn, he recalled, the founders focused on product and got very close to their few customers, asking what, in an awful climate, they would spend money on — and the answer was always return on investment: spend a dollar and make five dollars in return (AdExchanger). That was not possible, he argued, for legitimate companies working in display at the time; it was more of a search thing. So AdRoll started experimenting, and around 2008–09 it saw the rise of the advertising exchanges, which Berke called the big game changer (AdExchanger).

Retargeting had just entered the industry’s consciousness, and it was only being used by the largest brands and agencies — no mid-sized or small companies had used it yet (AdExchanger). AdRoll dabbled in it, unsure whether its customers would grasp the concept, and found they quickly did: after just hours of running targeting campaigns, they were seeing conversion. “Hey, we found a killer app here, let’s step on the gas,” was Berke’s summary — any brand, no matter how big or small, was going to be interested in retargeting (AdExchanger). The platform that followed was deliberately built as a scalable, automated software-as-a-service product, and by 2012 AdRoll had 5,000 active customers — the largest customer base of any retargeting company — adding about 500 a month (AdExchanger).

Berke stayed long enough to extend the model beyond display. As president and chief marketing officer, he launched SendRoll, AdRoll’s email-retargeting product, on the argument that the core technology of customer segmentation, user scoring, and personalized targeting could be applied to any marketing channel — so investing in email was a no-brainer (VentureBeat). He expected SendRoll to open the floodgates for personalized email marketing in the same way AdRoll had done for display retargeting in 2008, and the product launched with around 700 customers already signed up in pre-release, many seeing clickthrough rates double (VentureBeat).

From retargeting to managing managers

WorkPatterns, Berke’s next company, came directly out of the scaling problem he had lived through. He saw firsthand at AdRoll that a great company is all about the people, and the effect that great managers can have on the health of an organization is massive — yet there was nothing guiding what managers should do on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis, only cobbled-together documents and human-resources tools that tended to fall flat (HackerNoon). WorkPatterns provides tools for managers to organize, motivate, and engage their teams, guiding one-on-ones, team meetings, bi-directional feedback, recognition, and goal setting in a package people actually enjoy using (HackerNoon). The action the business tries to drive, Berke said, is people giving each other compliments — kudos in the product — because that leads to greater engagement (HackerNoon). It is a long way from retargeting banners, but the through-line is the same one Berke described in 2012: find the thing customers will actually spend on, and build the tool that makes it easy.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state a departure year for Berke from AdRoll: HackerNoon gives a ten-year tenure only. It does not assert any pre-AdRoll role, which appears only in interview snippets not read in full. It does not give WorkPatterns funding, customers, or current status. And it dates the SendRoll launch to 2016, following the March 2016 coverage cluster, while flagging that the AdRoll profile on this site dates it to 2015 — a discrepancy the site should correct rather than paper over.