Starting a new role during a global pandemic is no easy feat but The Trade Desk’s recently appointed general manager of Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) James Bayes has settled right in.
Joining the adtech company at the start of the year, Bayes was lucky enough to have some time in the office to meet the team in person before working from home became the new normal.
Bayes told AdNews he has “loved every minute” of his first 100 days in the role and has two key focuses for the business over the next six months.
“I wanted to come to The Trade Desk because it has the opportunity to play a really significant role in that transformation of traditional media,” he says.
Bayes joined The Trade Desk from Seven where he spent the last four years leading all aspects of the company’s digital commercial operations including the launch of its addressable TV business.
Prior to that, he spent a decade working at Southern Cross Austereo (SCA) and brings 25 years of experience in digital advertising with him to The Trade Desk.
Now that he is settled into his new role, Bayes says his next focus revolves around one of his core reasons for joining the business - the transformation of television in the local market.
“For the next six months, all of our focus is really on helping to solve this cross-screen trading problem around connected TV,” he says.
“For this market to be the first market outside of North America to be rolling out those tools is really, really exciting.”
The company recently announced it would extend its partnership with consumer cross-screen television and analytics provider Samba TV outside of the US to international markets beginning in Australia.
The expansion of the partnership globally will provide advertisers with insights to assess content consumption and advertising effectiveness across addressable television screens.
“Integrating that into our TV planning tools is going to help brands to execute their digital investment strategies based upon prior linear TV viewing behaviour,” Bayes says.
“It's stitching the screens together into a single investment decision and single view of a user.”
His other key focus over the next six months will be pushing the company’s custom API solution offering.
Locally, The Trade Desk has been investing in its engineering and product team which makes up half of the Australian office.
Bayes says the investment in local engineering, product, data science and solutions architects was another reason that made him excited to join the business.
“We need to put the smartest engineers in the country across the boardroom table from our clients to solve meaningful business problems, not just investment decisions,” he says.
“So, that custom solutions side of the business, which builds out things like custom algorithms and helps our partners to automate workflows, is a really important part of success in this market.”
As the pandemic continues to impact the world, the acceleration of digital transformation has been a common trend across industries.
Bayes says the company’s custom API solutions have been key to helping clients during this period to fast forward plans they may have had in the pipeline for automation or restructuring their business.
While he admits it is “silly” to pretend knowing what the future will hold at the moment, he does predict that data-driven marketing will become a core component for many businesses if it wasn’t already.
“I think one thing you can guarantee is that when we come out the other side of this thing, there's going to be an even sharper focus on return on ad spend than there ever was before,” he says.
“Channels that are measurable, that are transparent, that have a direct link to performance [and] that are underpinned by data.
“It's pretty hard to think that those things aren't going to come out the other side stronger than what we went in.”
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