Guest
Troy Townsend
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Zitcha
A decade in the Facebook ecosystem then five years building retail media technology, Townsend is about connecting media and merchant into one view before agents change the game.
About
Troy Townsend is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Zitcha, the technology platform that plumbs retailers into full media networks, serving ads across their websites, in-store screens and audio, and across Meta, Google, Snap and TikTok. He is known for reading channel growth early, first in social and then in retail media, and for arguing that networks only mature when the media and merchant sides of a business work to a single view.
Townsend set out from university to work in marketing and advertising, drawn by a field he found both creative and analytical, though he describes himself as business-led rather than a creative. His previous business focused on building scaled small and medium firms through technology, and he worked closely with Facebook as a channel from its infancy, spending a good 10 years in that ecosystem as it grew to mass adoption.
When he sold that business, Townsend saw Meta beginning to talk about a retail and brand product gaining traction, and recognised the same growth pattern he had watched in social. He jumped in about five years ago, co-founding Zitcha, where he now works with retailers from zero to one through to networks four or five years in, helping them connect media and merchant teams, orchestrate inventory, move from managed service to self-service, and prepare for agentic commerce. By his account there are now 280 retail media networks in the world.
Career16 years
- 2022 to now Zitcha Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder
- 2021 to now The Pistol Executive Director
- 2021 to now Greeneon Director
- 2019 to 2021 The Pistol Chief Executive Officer
Show earlier roles: Tiger Pistol, Geotoko
- 2019 to 2021 Tiger Pistol Co-Founder & CEO
- 2011 to 2019 Tiger Pistol Co Founder & Chief Client Officer
- 2010 to 2011 Geotoko VP Sales and Strategy
How Troy thinks3 convictions
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Buy-in from the top
Townsend argues a retail media network cannot be built as cheap, quick money. It needs to be bought in by the chief executive down as a core, multi-year part of the business, with the data, measurement and change management to match. Networks built to be cheap, he says, go stagnant fast.
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Where new margin comes from
For Townsend the easy phase is over. With e-commerce saturating, retailers must find margin offsite through players like Meta and TikTok, and from the store itself, a high-margin product that is digitising with screens and audio. The catch is that each surface is measured and controlled differently, so connecting them is the real work.
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Managed to self-service
Townsend points out that publisher growth comes from the torso and tail of advertisers, not just the top spenders. He believes retailers waste margin by managing every small campaign by hand, and that the win is moving from managed service to self-service so smaller buyers can run themselves. Technology, he says, is what connects those dots at scale.