Thomas Bailly recently joined Readpeak to drive the company’s expansion into new markets. Working from London, and with a background spanning Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, and Pinterest, he will lead our growth into four to six new territories each year, with a long-term ambition of reaching more than 25 markets worldwide by 2030.
Q1. What drew you to Readpeak, and why was this the right challenge for you now?
Native advertising is having an identity crisis. On one side, you’ve got platforms that commoditised the format into clickbait wallpaper. On the other, you’ve got premium publishers sitting on incredible content, without an elegant way to monetise it at scale. Readpeak, positioned halfway between tech infrastructure and media relationships, sits right in the middle of that tension and actually solves the quality and control problem.
Then there’s the European puzzle. Expanding across fragmented markets is like playing multiplayer chess: different languages, buyer behaviours, regulatory quirks, media landscapes… And most companies underestimate how hard it is to scale without losing coherence. That’s exactly the kind of problem I find irresistible.
Timing-wise, I’ve spent the best part of the past two decades building a playbook across Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter, Pinterest, and at some point you have to decide whether you want to keep serving giants or take part in building one. Working with Readpeak as a consultant, I caught a glimmer of greatness in the company’s culture, and the potential for a future global heavyweight. I felt that was the right moment to step in and deploy, rather than just prescribe.
Q2. Can you share a bit about your background and how it shapes your approach to international expansion?
I’ve built and scaled commercial teams across five continents, and then spent a year as a consultant specialising in market entry, sales transformation, and long-term commercial structuring. So I’ve seen expansion from every angle: the corporate playbook, the scrappy startup version, and the “we’ve got six months of runway to make this work” version.
What that gives you is pattern recognition. You develop an instinct for what kills momentum before revenue even appears: the wrong hire profile, premature localisation, overengineered processes for a market that doesn’t need them yet.
My core principle is simple: structure first, localisation second. Most companies reverse that order and end up with five markets doing five different things, none of them particularly well.
Q3. What trends excite you most in native advertising today, and how do you see advertisers responding?
First, younger audiences are quietly drifting away from social media, and that creates real oxygen for information distribution on trusted editorial platforms. The attention is migrating, and smart advertisers are following it.
Second, the growing transparency concerns against black-box algorithms. Advertisers are done accepting vague promises about ROAS, they want control over where they appear, and they want actual learnings they can act on, not just a dashboard that tells them to spend more.
Third, the slow death of the third-party cookie is forcing publishers to reclaim direct relationships with their audiences. That’s a structural shift, not a trend; and it plays directly into Readpeak’s hands.
And finally, of course, AI. The winners won’t be the ones who automate humans out of the loop. They’ll be the ones using AI to sharpen human judgement: explainable decisions, supervised by people who understand the context, actual accountability. Because an algorithm that cannot tell you why it recommended a choice isn’t intelligence; it’s a fancy coin flip.