Yahoo’s Andrew Gilbert appointed to lead Afterpay challenge
Andrew Gilbert, until now a senior director at Yahoo DSP, has been appointed to Afterpay to lead a drive which he says will see retail media broadening to “commerce media”.
Gilbert has already been working with Afterpay through a partnership that saw Yahoo DSP’s power the buy-now-pay-later platform’s media network. The arrangement let brands tap data-driven insights to reach shoppers across both online and in-store channels.
Now, however, Afterpay is ready to “take things to the next level”, and Gilbert has accepted the challenge: “I can see exactly where this thing’s going, which is awesome. And I wanted to be on this journey.”
Taking on the role of VP – advertising ecosystem ANZ, Gilbert will be responsible for working out where the platform, and its parent company Block Inc, can provide value for merchants. He will also lead the media network, which he hopes will “blow up” in the local market.
Andrew Gilbert
According to Gilbert, retail media is currently disconnected — many brands have their own networks to leverage, but there is no single, consistent, accessible organisation available.
And these individual networks are over complicating things, he argues. The increasing fragmentation in terms of what customers buy, where they buy it, and how they buy it, is too complex for the market. This is where he want the Afterpay network to come in, and by extension, where his priorities lie in the new role.
“The biggest thing I’m excited about is the opportunity, because if you talk about the challenges that marketers have right now, they’re moving into a world where growth is hard,” Gilbert told Mumbrella.
“We can help them get into that next phase of the life cycle.”
He has a strong vision for Afterpay in Australia, beyond the media network. He says it is time to “take what we know about retail and build it into the larger conversation, which is commerce media.”
“That shift is happening right now whether anyone likes it or not, and I want the Afterpay media network to be the key driver of that. I want this to be the thing that is going to blow up within the Australian market.”
The Afterpay brand is already quite strong locally. According to the platform, 40% of Aussies use some form of buy now, pay later schemes, and 72% of those use Afterpay. Millennials and Gen Z make up over two-thirds of its active user base. Gilbert says if he walked into a brand or agency today, they’d have some kind of connection to the platform — as a user, merchant, or advertiser.
And if brands succeed in Australia and have a good story, they will “be successful in other places”, according to Gilbert.
One other area he will be focused on is how he incorporates AI into the business.
“The world we work in now is so drastically different to the world that we worked in a year ago, there is simplicity in what we can build, there is automation, there are ways to run businesses which will change, and we want to make sure that as we’re building this, we’re taking advantage of all of that.”
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the creative and PR beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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