Nielsen’s content solutions business Gracenote has hired Bill Michels as the division’s new chief product officer, TheWrap has learned.
In his new role, Michels will be responsible for leading Gracenote’s global product team as it looks to expand its suite of video, sports and music products and accelerating the business’ market expansion efforts.
Michels has over two decades of product management, engineering and data partnership expertise across connected TV, ad tech and search, as well as experience scaling productions global. He previously served in 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,” Michels said in a statement. “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.”
Gracenote provides metadata for over 40 million titles in more than 260 streaming catalogues and 80 countries, as well as 35 languages.
It recently launched a data hub to complement Nielsen’s The Gauge and Media Distributor Gauge reports and provide insight into the current state of SVOD programming, illustrating whats keeping users engaged and to identifying trends and changes overtime by analyzing the current makeup of Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, Netflix and Paramount+’s content catalogs. Going forward, the Gracenote Data Hub will be updated quarterly.
“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,” Gracenote CEO Jared Grusd said in a statement. “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 is the latest addition to the Gracenote executive leadership team, following Chief Technology Officer Phani Kalagar earlier this year, who joined the business after serving in various leadership roles at PayPal, Flipkart, Advanced Interactive Systems and privately held fintech company Pine Labs.
