Bill Michels will lead Gracenote’s global product team as the company looks to grow its suite of video, sports and music products.
Gracenote, the content solutions business unit of Nielsen, has appointed Bill Michels as Chief Product Officer. In this role, Michels is responsible for leading Gracenote’s global product team as the company looks to grow its suite of video, sports and music products and accelerate key market expansion initiatives.
Speaking about Michels appointment, Jared Grusd, CEO at Gracenote, said: “As Gracenote redefines the role of metadata in an AI world, it was important to bring in someone like Bill Michels who has successfully built data businesses and platforms powered by machine learning. Bill joins at a very exciting time for Gracenote and his adjacent experience will help the company think more horizontally and accelerate our growth initiatives.”
Michels brings two decades of product management, engineering and data partnership expertise across CTV, ad tech and search to Gracenote, as well as deep experience operationalising and scaling products globally. He has held senior leadership roles at companies including Moloco, The Trade Desk, Foursquare/Factual and Yahoo.
“As someone who is passionate about data, the chance to create products powered by Gracenote’s unparalleled dataset—the industry’s most comprehensive and enriched—is truly exciting,” said Bill Michels. “I’m thrilled to join such a talented team and eager to bring my experience to the table as we drive Gracenote’s next evolution of growth.”
Michels’ appointment marks the most recent addition to the Gracenote executive leadership team. Earlier this year, Phani Kalagara was named Chief Technology Officer for Gracenote. Phani is a highly accomplished technology leader with deep expertise building large, diverse and high performing global teams. He has held various leadership roles at multinational companies such as PayPal, Flipkart, Advanced Interactive Systems, and Pine Labs.
