Rokt on Making the Power 100, High-Intent Commerce, and Scaling with Awin

Rokt has become something of a poster boy for fast-growing martech. Founded in Sydney in 2012 and now headquartered in New York, the company helps advertisers reach shoppers at the "transaction moment": the high-intent window between checkout and confirmation. 

It’s part of Awin’s brand partnerships movement, where advertisers can earn commission by sharing rewards from partner brands or acquire new customers by sharing rewards themselves.  

On an affiliate platform like Awin, the nuances of partners like Rokt mean you can recruit new partners and scale either your revenue or acquisition channel incredibly fast.  

But Rokt is a little different than some.  

You might have seen its branding on the Oracle Red Bull Racing cars. Or perhaps you’ve spotted its name in the business bulletins, having recently reached a valuation north of $7 billion IPO hopeful Rokt’s valuation surges to $7.2b. Such is the demand for Rokt’s technology, it’s widely expected to pursue a US public listing in the near future. 

It's also a member of Awin's Power 100: a showcase of the 100 most innovative partners on the Awin platform network.  

At ThinkTank Americas, we sat down with Rayan Nahas, VP of Channel Partnerships at Rokt, to talk about why demand for the channel keeps climbing, what it's like working inside a company growing at that pace, and how the partnership with Awin fits into it all. 

View Rayan’s full interview above, or check the write-up below.  

Rayan, congratulations! Rokt has made the Power 100. Could you describe what Rokt is? 

Rokt is a channel that helps advertisers acquire customers during the transaction moment. That's the flow people are in once they've made a choice on the commerce side. They've decided what they want to purchase and they're following a pretty standard series of steps, from the selection card through the payments page to the confirmation page. 

Essentially, Rokt enables advertisers to engage that audience at a moment where there's very high intent to make a purchase. Imagine you've just made a purchase and I invite you to make a second one. A lot of people tend to take that on. So from an engagement and conversion perspective, we see very high results. That's basically what we do: we help brands find high-intent audiences at the moment they're most likely to convert and help them acquire net new shoppers. 

In the year you joined, 2024, Rokt grew 40% even after years of expansion. Can you put your finger on why demand is so high? 

I think the simple answer is that it works. If you're able to solve for a need that advertisers and marketers have, you're more likely to unlock that value and attract more of it. 

We actually call this the ‘Rokt flywheel’. We put the consumer at the heart of everything we do, we think about you as a shopper, and if we show you something relevant, you're more likely to convert on it. If you convert, the advertiser is more likely to acquire that new customer, be happy, and spend more. If they spend more, the merchant in our ecosystem is better at monetizing their inventory and making their own customers happier, because we've proven that person found utility in what we presented, which helps us drive more customers.  

That's the flywheel, and it's rooted in one baseline principle: relevance at the heart of everything. We're not showing any offer to any customer. We show the most relevant thing to that person, at that point in time, at a moment when they're most open to engaging with it. 

That's been working. And the 40% wasn't just 2024; 2025 held, and 2026 is looking pretty promising too. There's something that's working. 

I can feel that enthusiasm. What's it like personally, working somewhere where the bar keeps getting higher? 

Between the high growth expectations and everything happening more broadly in the ecosystem with AI - the ability to really supercharge and 10x what you do - Rokt very much lives the cliché of the 10x team and the 10x founder. We have a 10x operator mindset at every level of the organization. It's super exciting, and it's an amazing environment to be part of - but it's not for the faint of heart. You need to be ready for the ride. If you are, there's a lot to be won from it. 

How do you find working with Awin? 

The way we work with Awin, and why Awin is such a great partner for Rokt, comes down to your rich, broad ecosystem of advertisers. During the keynote earlier today [at ThinkTank Americas], it was noted that out of all the affiliate networks, Awin has the largest base of advertisers. For Rokt, it's really compelling to be able to tap into an ecosystem of brands that could find value in what we do. 

Obviously we can't work with everyone, and that's where the other things Awin brings to the table come in. The big one for me, and I think this is the crux of why I love working with Awin, is that we've built a deeper integration using the Awin MasterTag. One side of the relevance piece I mentioned, which is core to the Rokt value proposition, is the data and signals we get. The only way I can show you a relevant offer is if I understand how similar offers have performed for people like you. Without those signals, it's very hard. 

Thanks to the MasterTag, we're able to quickly onboard advertisers who can pass back and integrate richer signals, which wasn't necessarily the case in the past. That shift - Awin becoming a platform that doesn't just help with attribution but also with capturing and returning those signals to partners - has been a real stepping stone in our evolution.  

I work closely with the Awin teams, not just to find more relevant brands that can find value, but to find ways to activate them faster, more efficiently, and at scale across the Rokt ecosystem. 

No crystal ball needed, but after all this growth, what does the future look like for Rokt? Where are things heading next? 

There are a few areas that are continuously evolving. Especially with AI and everything happening more broadly, figuring out where consumers are going to be and how their behavior is going to be reshaped is central to how we think about things.  

When we think of Rokt as a channel that transforms commerce media and that transaction moment, the question becomes: ‘what is that transaction moment going to be?’ Is it still on the sites and apps of brands? Does it exist in LLMs? Other ecosystems? Part of our thinking is where Rokt should be as we continue to evolve. 

On a parallel path, which goes back to the heart of Rokt, is the algorithm and how we continue to drive the most relevance to consumers. Because of everything happening from an AI, LLM and data-processing perspective, our ability to find the best thing to show someone at a given moment has really multiplied. Our goal now is building the infrastructure and ecosystem that lets us keep solving for that customer need and stay a channel that's truly incremental, efficient, and solves a need in an ever-evolving marketing landscape. 

You dropped a few trends in there. What's the single biggest one you're talking about in the office right now? 

Probably data. It's about how we continuously evolve both from an audience perspective and a targeting and conversion perspective. What are all the signals we're capturing? And how do we bring those in to help a brand find value from the start with Rokt, based on everything we've learned, and then continuously drive efficiencies for them? 

Like everything nowadays, if you zoom out: it's much more costly for brands to acquire customers, and much tougher for them to understand attribution with everything happening. So we're trying to solve for all of that while centering everything around measurability and data.  

Going back to our flywheel, if you understand your customer, and not just the advertiser but the end consumer they're trying to reach, and that consumer finds value, everyone else finds value too. That's the first principle we go back to every time we figure out our next move as an organization. 

Strike up a partnership with Rokt, or browse the Power 100 for influencers, tech partners, coupon sites, and more.