Nielsen appointed Bill Michels as Gracenote’s new Chief Product Officer

Gracenote, the content solutions business unit of Nielsen, has announced the appointment of Bill Michels as Chief Product Officer. In this role, he 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.

“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,” said Jared Grusd, CEO at Gracenote. “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 operationalizing 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.”

Bill 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. Kalagara 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 and Advanced Interactive Systems. Most recently, Kalagara served as Chief Product and Technology Officer at Pine Labs, a privately held fintech company focused on building merchant platforms and payment solutions that enable efficient financial transactions.