Nielsen Appoints Bill Michels as Gracenote's New Chief Product Officer

NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Gracenote, the content solutions business unit of Nielsen, has announced the appointment of Bill Michels as Chief Product Officer. In this role, Bill 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."

Bill 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's 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 and Advanced Interactive Systems. Most recently, Phani 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.

About Gracenote
Gracenote is the content data business unit of Nielsen, providing entertainment metadata, content IDs and related offerings to the world's leading creators, distributors and platforms. Gracenote has aggregated, normalized and enriched core program metadata covering 40M+ titles in 260+ streaming catalogs in 35 languages and 80+ countries. Gracenote technology enables advanced content navigation and discovery capabilities helping individuals to easily connect to the TV shows, movies, music and sports they love while delivering powerful content analytics making complex business decisions simpler. For more information, visit Gracenote.com.

SOURCE Gracenote