Head of Advertising Sales

Company Description

At Nielsen, we are passionate about powering a better media future for all people by providing powerful, essential insights that drive client decisions and deliver extraordinary results. Our talented, global workforce is dedicated to capturing audience engagement with content-wherever and whenever it's consumed.

Gracenote, a Nielsen Company, is the world's leading provider of entertainment metadata and content IDs. We sit at the intersection of media, technology, and data, helping the world's largest entertainment brands connect people to the content they love.

Gracenote Ads is a new business unit that leverages Gracenote's gold-standard content metadata to solve one of the core challenges in CTV advertising today: lack of quality contextual advertising signals.

When you join Nielsen and Gracenote, you will be part of a dynamic team committed to excellence, perseverance, and making a significant impact together. We champion you, because when you succeed, we do too. We enable your best to power our future.

Job Description

We are seeking an experienced, visionary leader to join our dynamic Customer Organization at Gracenote to be the commercial leader for Gracenote's new advertising business. As VP of Gracenote Ads Sales, you'll be responsible for setting the commercial vision and directly engaging with our first customers at brands and agencies to educate them on the value of Gracenote advertising, develop leads, and convert our first business opportunities.

Gracenote advertising is an emerging and exciting new growth vector for Gracenote. This role will be hugely impactful in shaping commercial strategy, product strategy, pricing, and building out an organization to scale Gracenote ads over the coming years.

The ideal candidate is a strategic thinker who can also roll up their sleeves and be the face of this new advertising solution to buyers across the industry. This role requires a leader with a consultative, solutions-oriented mindset who can build and lead a high-performance sales team and aggressively pursue new client acquisition to establish Gracenote as an indispensable partner to brands and agencies.

Responsibilities

• Deliver on revenue growth targets by clearly articulating and selling the company's vision, setting and managing client expectations, and consistently advancing Gracenote's strategic agenda.
• Aggressively pursue new client acquisition to expand the portfolio and outperform competitors, working closely with advertisers and agencies to uncover creative, high-impact avenues for growth.
• Build and nurture relationships with senior executives across major advertising and media agencies and brands.
• Forecast and manage sales pipelines with data fluency; owning the predictable growth of this new business for Gracenote.
• Build out a new ad sales division of the Gracenote sales organization, scaling it as this new business line grows.
• Be the strategic thought partner to our VP of Ad Product to develop and scale this new business line with input from customers.

Qualifications

• A demonstrated track record of driving significant revenue growth in highly competitive markets and successfully navigating industry disruption (e.g., streaming growth, privacy changes).
• Proven experience securing complex, multi-year, multi-million-dollar deals and a history of overcoming client resistance to change.
• A "people champion" with a history of building, leading, and mentoring high-performance, metrics-driven sales teams.
• Strong executive presence and communication skills, with the ability to build trust in evolving data environments.
• Key knowledge in the following areas:

• CTV Ad Ecosystem: Deep understanding and familiarity with the CTV ad market, key trends and dynamics
• Programmatic Technology: Fluency in how programmatic technology is automating the process of TV buying
• Ad Spend Dynamics: A clear understanding of how ad spend is shifting from Linear into Digital

Related Reading

• https://gracenote.com/segments/advertiser/
• https://www.indexexchange.com/press/press-releases/index-exchange-partners-with-gracenote/
• https://thedesk.net/2025/10/gracenote-ctv-advertising-contextual-data/

LI-AW1

Additional Information

Enabling your best to power a better media future. Our comprehensive benefits package (including health & wellness plans, 401(k) retirement coupled with a Nielsen match, a generous paid time off policy, company provided car for those who qualify, and if eligible, a discretionary incentive/bonus) is designed to be inclusive for all employees and families, and we take pride in ensuring that employees are rewarded holistically for the role they are doing and their performance.

A reasonable estimated salary range for a new employee has been provided. It would be adjusted based on each employee's geographic location. The position of each employee within a compensation range at Nielsen is dependent on several individual circumstances, such as experience, training, certifications and other business requirements/needs.

Nielsen makes hiring decisions without regard to disability status, protected veteran status, or membership in any other protected class.

Please be aware that job-seekers may be at risk of targeting by scammers seeking personal data or money. Nielsen recruiters will only contact you through official job boards, LinkedIn, or email with a nielsen.com domain. Be cautious of any outreach claiming to be from Nielsen via other messaging platforms or personal email addresses. Always verify that email communications come from an @nielsen.com address. If you're unsure about the authenticity of a job offer or communication, please contact Nielsen directly through our official website or verified social media channels.

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