• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, December 23, 2016

Pandora this week announced it hired Eric Picard to be VP of ad product management. He’ll be tasked with expanding, developing, and managing Pandora’s ad products, including display and video ad products and will build its programmatic audio offering. He’ll manage the company’s advertiser technology, buying, and advertiser experience teams.

Picard will report directly to Pandora’s Chief Product Officer Chris Phillips.

Picard brings more than 20 years of experience in ad tech to the Pandora. Prior to joining the company, Picard led product strategy for MediaMath’s TerminalOne demand-side platform. Before that, he founded Bluestreak in 1997 and startup Rare Crowds in 2012, which MediaMath acquired in 2014. Earlier in his career, he also led global ad-tech strategy at Microsoft.

Picard noted that Pandora is already a huge ad platform, generating more than $1 billion in annual revenue.  “There’s a big opportunity for new ad formats and creative,” he told Real-Time Daily. Plus, he said, the  intersection of native-based creative and dynamic ads is a good opportunity, “I’m thinking about how all of those things fit together,” he said.

Pandora is known for having a sophisticated engineering team and solid investment in ad tech R&D, both of which were draws for Picard.

“People haven’t figured out the future of audio, but there’s a huge amount of ad supply in audio, display, and video—how does this play out in audio?” Picard asked. He expects Pandora to invest in programmatic audio—when and how are question marks at the moment.

In audio, Picard sees an opportunity to “participate in such a large marketplace for an ad media type that hasn’t been fully explored yet.” The prospect of playing in this arena is obviously exciting to him.

Picard noted that Pandora has existing partnerships with all the largest vendors in the space and will continue to use them. The company will also invest in its own tech. What’s most exciting to him is that because Pandora owns the entire user experience around audio consumption and audio advertising, there’s an opportunity to improve the user experience and the audio experience simultaneously: “This is an area that doesn’t get explored much,” Picard said.