Jed Dederick spent nearly fourteen years at The Trade Desk, rising to chief revenue officer before stepping out to join creator affiliate platform ShopMy as its new CRO. He officially started on October 13, reporting straight to chief executive Harry Rein.
Dederick sees his new job as a direct continuation of ad tech history. At The Trade Desk, digital media was a messy landscape of manual deals and custom insertion orders before programmatic platforms built automated clearinghouses. "Through the evolution of programmatic, we uncovered the value of liquidity and automation," he said. "I see that happening in creator commerce now."
When a demand-side platform executive talks about bringing liquidity and automation to creator commerce, agency talent managers should pay close attention to the vocabulary. In programmatic advertising, liquidity is what happens when thousands of disparate websites get aggregated into standard ad units, allowing media buyers to bid on target audiences instead of courting individual publishers.
Applied to creator affiliate links, automation means taking curated brand endorsements and stripping away the manual negotiation that made them expensive in the first place. An affiliate platform that operates like a demand-side platform turns a talent roster into programmatic inventory. Brands stop negotiating direct sponsorships with individual talent managers and start buying automated access to recommendation engines across thousands of creator storefronts at once.
The Trade Desk built a $40 billion business by making web publisher inventory interchangeable, low-friction, and cheap to buy at scale. ShopMy's new CRO is bringing that exact playbook to creator affiliate links, where the word liquidity usually means everyone's commission rate settles at whatever the algorithm decides inventory is worth today.