Meet the Gracenote leadership team

Jared Grusd joined Nielsen as CEO of Gracenote in July 2024. 

Most recently he was the co-founder of Ethiqly AI, a venture-backed educational technology company utilizing artificial intelligence to elevate human expression and empowerment. 

Previously, he held leadership roles at some of the world's most innovative companies - including serving as Chief Strategy Officer of Snapchat, Chime, and AOL, General Counsel of Spotify, and CEO of HuffPost & SVP of News of Verizon. He also worked as a senior executive at Google. In addition, Jared co-founded Shake, a legal-tech startup acquired by LegalShield. He previously served on the boards of Newsela and SoulCycle. 

Jared is passionate about building transformative businesses that leverage technology to improve society. He is deeply committed to training future technology leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors. For over ten years, he's been a leading professor at Columbia Business School, specializing in  corporate strategies for high-growth companies. He also teaches entrepreneurship at the  University of Southern California, and the dynamics of high-growth industries at the University of Chicago Law School, where he's a member of the Advisory Council. 

Jared's notable contributions have earned him a place in Adweek's Class of Young Influentials, Business Insider's Silicon Alley Top 100, and CNN/Money/Fortune's list of five of Tech's most powerful lawyers. Jared holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, a JD with Honors from the University of Chicago Law School, and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. 

Sujit Das Munshi is the Chief Operating Officer of Gracenote, the world’s leading entertainment metadata and content ID company. He previously served as Gracenote’s General Manager where he led the company’s largest transformation while establishing a framework of operational excellence that has increased the company’s global data coverage and elevated its quality standards to better serve its global customers. 

Sujit’s distinguished career at Nielsen has spanned leadership positions across commercial, operations and talent roles globally.  Notably, he led the company’s strategic partnership with Facebook resulting in advanced Media Advertising Effectiveness products.  Sujit first joined Nielsen in 1998 when his strategic consulting services and brand research startup, IRIS (Indian Research and Information Services), merged with AC Nielsen ORG-MARG.

Sujit has a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Bombay and a Masters in Marketing Management from the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies of the University of Bombay. 

As Chief Revenue Officer at Gracenote, Tim Cutting drives the company's long-term growth by leading a global Commercial team and fostering collaboration across Product, Marketing, Customer Experience and other functional areas of the organization. He brings a strategic mindset to his responsibilities for defining and executing sales initiatives which enable customers worldwide to drive consumer engagement with content, differentiate their entertainment offerings and maximize monetization in the streaming age.

Prior to rejoining Gracenote in 2022, Tim served as General Manager of Commercial for Reelgood a data company focusing on streaming content serving both B2B and B2C customers. Before that, he was Head of North America Sales for Gracenote, overseeing the company's strategic sales initiatives designed to help CE, digital media and TV provider customers develop and launch new entertainment experiences.

Tim earned an MBA from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a Bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Bill Michels serves as Chief Product Officer at Gracenote responsible for overseeing global product strategy and execution with emphasis on the company’s content Distribution, Discovery and Advertising segments. In this role, he leads efforts to launch new products globally and accelerate key growth initiatives in close collaboration with Gracenote’s engineering and data science teams. 

Bill brings two decades of product management and data partnership expertise to Gracenote having successfully built data-driven products and businesses across ad tech, CTV, search, and mobile. Most recently, he was General Manager of Commerce Media at Moloco, a machine learning-powered advertising solutions company. Bill’s earlier roles included EVP of Product and Engineering at The Trade Desk, Chief Data Officer at Foursquare and Chief Operating Officer at Factual. 

Bill is an IAB Data Rockstars award winner and a named inventor on three patents. He earned an MBA from Columbia Business School and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Colby College.

Ginger Bushell serves as Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer at Gracenote leading efforts to ensure the company is well positioned in the face of seismic change disrupting the media and entertainment industry today. Prior to this, she was Senior Vice President, Business Development and Strategy responsible for driving strategic business deals and commercializing new bisiness opportunities across the company.

Before joining Gracenote, Ginger was Senior Vice President and Head of Strategy and Business Development at M-GO, a video streaming service brought to market jointly by Dream Works Animation and Technicolor. There, she played an instrumental role in negotiating M-GO's first studio content licensing deals and bringing both an integrated movie store and 4K streaming offering to the platform.

Ginger holds an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Colby College. She is passionate about DE&l advocacy and serves as the executive sponsor of Gracenote's Abled & Disabled Employees Partnering Together (ADEPT) Business Resource Group.

As Chief Human Resources Officer at Gracenote, Maxine Slater leads a team of global business partners who collaborate closely with Gracenote leaders to drive the company's global talent acquisition and management strategy, build people capability and develop programs dedicated to achieving organizational and cultural objectives.

Before being appointed to the top HR role at Gracenote, Maxine served as Senior Vice President and HR Leader overseeing corporate functions at Nielsen. In this position, she oversaw the Global Corporate People Partner team and delivered talent strategy and people experience services to Nielsen's Finance, Marketing & Communications, People, Legal, Cyber Security and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&l) functions.

Earlier in her career at Nielsen, Maxine served in a number of commercial leadership roles in the UK and Ireland handling important fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) and retailer relationships.

As Chief Technology Officer at Gracenote, Phanimohan (Phani) Kalagara oversees the company’s global technology teams, functions and workstreams. He is responsible for mobilizing a world-class engineering organization and driving the evolution of Gracenote platforms as well as leveraging AI to optimize internal processes and bring new product offerings to market.

Over a long career as a technology leader, Phani has successfully built large, diverse and high-performing global teams. Most recently, he served as Chief Product and Technology Officer at Pine Labs, a fintech company focused on building new platforms and solutions to enable more efficient financial transactions. Phani has held various senior technology roles at multinational companies including PayPal, Flipkart and Advanced Interactive Systems. 

He earned a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Utah State University and a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in Hyderabad, India. 

Sal Karottki, is Gracenote's General Counsel, leading the legal function with an emphasis on corporate matters, commercial contracts, intellectual property matters (patent, trademark, and copyright), M&A, competition issues, litigation and dispute resolution, and regulatory/compliance matters. In addition to his Gracenote responsibilities, he supports Nielsen's corporate legal organization, managing the company's IP portfolio and litigation, and supervising the Legal Ops and M&A functions.

Prior to joining Nielsen, Sal served as Chief Intellectual Property Counsel and Vice President, Legal at Tribune Media. There, he handled litigation, commercial contracts, M&A, privacy, antitrust compliance, FCPA and OFAC compliance, and legal support for Procurement in addition to heading up the IP function.

Sal started his career at Sidley LLP after earning his JD from Duke University School of Law.

In the newly created role of Head of Product Innovation at Gracenote, Trent Wheeler anticipates upcoming media and entertainment industry challenges in order to develop new solutions that meet the evolving needs of a broadening array of global enterprises. Leveraging a deep understanding of Gracenote’s current business as well as blue sky opportunities, he is responsible for leading the company’s entry into new markets and empowering new customers with gold-standard Gracenote content solutions. 

Previously, Trent was Chief Product Officer at Gracenote. Under his leadership, the company launched a new Contextual Video Data solution providing CTV publishers all new program-level ad targeting capabilities based on Gracenote’s widely adopted metadata taxonomy. In addition, he oversaw development of the Gracenote Nexus Auto platform enabling OEMs to own the in-car media experiences they offer through infotainment interfaces seamlessly bridging audio, sports and video content. 

Trent possesses 20 years of experience in Product Management working with the world's biggest and most innovative digital entertainment brands.

As Global Head of Marketing and Communications at Gracenote, Sunok Pak is responsible for helping to drive the company’s growth and entry into new market segments, educating the industry on the impact of Gracenote innovations and stewarding the Gracenote brand.

Previously, Sunok led product marketing at Nielsen where she played an integral role launching Nielsen ONE, the company’s transformational cross-media measurement solution.

Sunok spent much of her early career at leading global public relations agencies Hill & Knowlton and Ruder Finn counseling Fortune 500 companies, global media companies and technology start-ups on how best to reach their B2B, B2C and B2B2C target audiences.

Jeanette Fowler is Head of Global Content Solutions at Gracenote responsible for overseeing international teams focused on metadata ingestion and enrichment as well as developing operational processes and tools leveraging machine learning technologies. She actively partners with the company’s Product and Technology teams to maximize data quality, scalability and speed-to-market.

Before joining Gracenote, Jeannette served in roles at Nielsen with escalating responsibility culminating in VP, Technology Strategy.

Over more than twenty-four years with Gracenote and Nielsen, she has built a track record of developing operational and technology resources and processes to meet customers’ changing business needs.

Bridget Schreiber is Global Head of CPX and Quality at Gracenote responsible for delivering first-class support and consultative guidance to customers and partners in all regions of the world. Her teams leverage technical acumen and subject matter expertise to ensure external parties enjoy optimal journeys with Gracenote offerings so they can maximize the potential of their entertainment services. 

Before being elevated to her current role at Gracenote, Bridget led an international team working across Product, Customer & Partner Experience, Technology and Commercial functions to ensure that the company's data meets the highest standards for timeliness, accuracy and completeness. Prior to that, she established and led enablement functions responsible for quality-focused business process improvement initiatives for other Nielsen businesses including Audience Measurement, Nielsen IQ and Nielsen Sports. 

Through her nearly two-decade career at Nielsen, Bridget has built unmatched expertise around continuous business process improvement (BPI), operational metrics, reporting and KPI measurement. She earned a Lean Six Sigma BPI certification in 2011.

As Global Head of Finance at Gracenote, Corry Delaney leads a team of business partners who collaborate closely with senior leadership to drive the company's financial performance through rigorous, data-driven planning and analysis. Previously, at Gracenote’s parent company, Nielsen, he was Vice President, Finance for the global Commercial organization. In that role, he was responsible for driving effective investment and staffing strategies in partnership with Sales leaders.

During an earlier stint at Gracenote, Corry served in a number of roles culminating in Director of Commercial Finance. Prior to that, he spent four years on Nielsen’s Corporate Audit Staff.

Corry began his professional career in Nielsen’s Financial Leadership Program after earning his Bachelor's degree in Finance from Virginia Tech.