Bill Michels knows programmatic data.
For the past couple years, he’s led The Trade Desk’s entire product group.
At Yahoo search in the mid-naughts, he was senior director of product management. He followed that up with a stint as COO of the location data company Factual and then was chief data officer at Foursquare, after it acquired Factual.
Now, Michels is headed to Moloco, where he’s starting as general manager of the company’s retail media business unit.
Why switch from The Trade Desk and a string of big names in online advertising to an upstart player like Moloco?
It’s all about the potential opportunity in retail media to take advantage of the web’s most lucrative invention: the search query.
“I think search is one of the most elegant businesses ever created. I love the simplicity,” Michels said.
Retail media today is like the early days of search, he said. Whole new verticals and marketer applications being discovered seemingly week to week. AdExchanger caught up with Michels about his new gig and the opportunity he sees for retail advertising to shake up the internet, as he’s seen front and center with companies like Yahoo and The Trade Desk.
AdExchanger: What’s the appeal of retail media to you, with your background in programmatic?
BILL MICHELS: Retailers have a really strong position, since they allocate spend at the right point in the consumer journey.
It’s also not intrusive. Retail ads plays into the flow of shopping and discovery. If they’re done well, search result ads are super relevant.
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It’s also great because marketplaces have a logged-in experience. A regular piece of inventory, an advertiser gets a keyword or some contextual signal, perhaps, some third-party segment data, and if you’re lucky a scrap of first-party data that could match off a cookie or some other ID key.
Retail media is a product where you’re swimming in first-party data. Especially in a platform that’s able to relay that first-party data. What has this person purchased over time? What do they search for across different marketplaces? The retail ad platform is embedded in that first-party data and all that data is part of every impression and search opportunity.
Retail advertising makes plain sense for retailers, but does it benefit the open web, which has been a big part of the programmatic value prop?
Something I liked about The Trade Desk was that they were an advocate for the open web. I love building products that help keep the concentration of power from landing with just a few.
How that idea plays out in retail media, first of all, is we want to have lots and lots of places where merchants can sell their products and where consumers can buy those products. In terms of the long tail of content publishers and app developers that have a small first-party data set, now they have incredibly rich first-party data that can extend into their apps, or to CTV apps too, and raise those CPMs.
If the merchant feels good about the higher price they’re paying based on the data the retailer brings, that retailer can bring [that] data to bear on the open internet [buying media for the merchant].
Retail media seems limited right now retailers’ own sites and apps. So, where’s all the inventory coming from?
I know what you mean. I had the same reaction actually in the past as I ramped up on CTV. I was thinking, like, “Isn’t it just like five apps with all the viewership?”
But as you dig in you realize, oh, there are a lot of these streaming apps that I don’t use as a consumer but have massive volume and APIs that aggregate them up. And they’re very meaningful taken together.
And on the retail media side, I would say that there’s a similar model with the marketplaces. They’re all over the world, constantly just more and more of them. We’ve done incredibly well in Asia, where we see these marketplaces popping up and our target list keeps growing.
Maybe there’s a Shopify merchant who sells hammocks, or a mechanic selling auto parts and services. Three years ago, they were buying Facebook ads and that flywheel was spinning. Perhaps they sold on Amazon and used those sponsored search ads.
There’s been a realization now where those independent sellers say, “Oh, there are 30 other places where I can sell my product.”
Think of it like this: There are Doordashes in every country. Multiple of them. And in every vertical – rideshare, travel, ticket sales, furniture, etc. – there are versions of the marketplace for that.
We’ll be powering the sponsored search and ads product inside those other retail marketplaces. To the point abut CTV supply, as you get to know these marketplaces, the scale of it is way larger than what you might initially anticipate.
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