James Taylor is the founder and CEO of Particular Audience, an AI-native retail media and personalisation platform that combines site search, product recommendations and sponsored advertising for retailers, with clients that the company says have included Hamleys, Petbarn and Target.
On 1 October 2026 the business launched Trade Media, a managed service that brings the measurement and control of digital media to supplier-funded online promotions.
A week later Particular Audience was one of four headline sponsors of IAB Europe’s Retail Media Impact Summit in Amsterdam. Taylor, who leads the company from its London office, tells Business Matters why advice is cheap to give and expensive to employ, and why you only fail when you give up.
What do you currently do at Particular Audience?
For any CEO and business leader, that is a very loaded question. Obviously, my primary role is to keep driving the business forward, which means overseeing everything: IT, recruitment, funding, HR, marketing and business development.
The marketing side of things means I am often, though not always, the public face of the company, and I relish the opportunity to speak at industry events, whether in a keynote capacity or on a panel. There is nothing like putting yourself out there among your peers if you want to learn and develop as a person and as a CEO.
I spoke at six events last year, including DMEXCO in Cologne, the SMG Retail Media Summit in London and Commerce Media Days in New York. This year it is more than 10 so far, including MAD//Fest and RMX in London, and Ascendant Network in New York, Paris and Palo Alto, with London to come in November. I also led the AI town hall at IAB Europe’s Retail Media Impact Summit in Amsterdam, where Particular Audience was headline sponsor.
The great thing about running a business is that no two days are ever the same, and they are rarely dull. As good as the middle management layer of any business is, it is a fact of life that the crunchiest problems tend to end up on the CEO’s desk. I will not pretend that dealing with them is always fun, but it is energising, challenging and incredibly stimulating.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is a maxim I set great store by, which is that you should never ask anyone to do something you would not do yourself, and that guides my approach to the business.
What was the inspiration behind your business?
In a prior role between 2014 and 2017, I worked with manual and rules-based systems. I found it very limiting and frustrating. I thought there had to be a better way, and my investigations led me to develop a deep interest in artificial intelligence.
At that time, the most prominent application of AI in a marketing sense was machine learning-powered recommendation systems, pioneered by companies like Amazon and Spotify, but which now increasingly shape our experiences online.
I came across Anand Rajaraman, who had been the head of technology at Amazon in the late 1990s. He had co-authored a book called Mining of Massive Datasets, which was all about this stuff, and I was hooked. I did some online courses at Stanford, and got my head around how Amazon’s recommendation system actually functions.
What really struck me was that, unlike a lot of technology around prediction, it is not about testing a hypothesis. It is about data, adapting what a user sees in real time, based on their behaviour, to make it more relevant to them.
Once I got my head around that, I realised how valuable this could be to retailers of all sizes, and how many of their recommendation engines were manually driven. If 10 people type the same term into a search bar on a website, they all get the same result. That is just wrong.
So I set out to create a platform that worked like Amazon’s and could be applied to other retail websites, and that is what we have been building and fine-tuning at Particular Audience for the last nine years.
What is Trade Media, and why launch it now?
Trade Media takes the flexibility, measurement and control that brands expect from digital media and applies them to supplier-funded promotions online. Traditionally those budgets are committed well in advance, and the way they are spent is opaque: there is no targeting, no flexibility and barely any measurement.
With Trade Media, brands and retailers can launch a promotion straight away, track its impact and adjust it according to customer behaviour, competitor activity or even the weather. It builds on Price Beat, a module we launched in 2021 that scans competitor prices and applies only the discount needed to beat the best one.
So rather than a blanket 10 per cent off, a brand might offer 2.5 per cent, and only if a rival product with an identical specification is priced lower. It is not a new reason for brands to fund discounts, but a more controlled, measurable way to deploy the funding they already use.
Who do you admire?
Taken in the round, he is a very divisive figure, but if we are talking about business and technology prowess, Elon Musk. It is easy to forget now how dismissive the established car makers were about EVs just a few years ago.
Then look at how he has commercialised reusable rockets for space flight with SpaceX. And let us not forget that Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit research lab.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
I would not have taken as much advice. No one has the day-to-day, first-principles exposure to the problems in your business that you do, so it is really important to go with your gut feeling, and treat other people’s advice as cheap to give and expensive to employ.
As a founder, you know and love and believe in your business more than anybody, so it is essential to retain control of the big decisions, because you are the one best placed to make the right calls.
What defines your way of doing business?
I am open, maybe too open. I like to think I am fair, transparent and honest. Whatever decisions I take, whether the people around me agree with them or not, they know why I have taken them.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
Do not rush the budgets. It is vital to get these right so you do not end up running out of money. And do not expect an easy ride.
You will face plenty of existential challenges, but if you can stay alive, you will find that somehow, a decade later, you are still doing what you set out to do. You only fail when you give up.
