YesPress Profile — Digital Commerce
CEO, Flywheel Ventures • Omnicom Group
He built the infrastructure for how brands sell online - then sold it for $835 million. Now he's running the next chapter inside the world's largest advertising holding company.
Profile
Deren Baker doesn't talk about disruption. He talks about the gap between where a customer is and where a brand thinks they are - and how most companies are flying blind across that distance. His entire career has been a series of attempts to close it.
At Flywheel Ventures, the innovation arm of the Flywheel Commerce Network inside Omnicom Group, Baker leads the push into the next generation of retail commerce - TikTok Shops, Walmart Marketplace, emerging digital channels that didn't exist in their current form five years ago. Flywheel now serves more than 4,500 brands across Amazon, Walmart, TikTok, Alibaba, and a constellation of other digital marketplaces, with a team of 2,600+ people and revenues touching $184 million annually.
Before Flywheel, Baker ran Edge by Ascential, the data and insights division that gave global brands and retailers actionable intelligence about what was actually happening on digital shelves. It's the kind of work that sounds dry until you realize that a 0.3% difference in a product's search ranking on Amazon can represent tens of millions of dollars in sales.
Baker came to commerce analytics through an unlikely route. His academic background is in American History and English Literature at Vanderbilt - two disciplines more associated with narrative than numbers. Then a Duke MBA. Then Travelocity, where he spent years across merchandising, travel extras, and marketing services before moving into more operationally intensive roles at companies like ezRez and Switchfly.
The throughline from a 2002 job at Travelocity to a 2023 landmark acquisition is a consistent bet on the same idea: that the customer's actual path - what they search, what they click, what they almost buy - contains more signal than any survey or focus group ever will. Baker built companies that proved that thesis, one data point at a time.
"Retail media is not advertising. It's commerce." - Deren Baker
Career Arc
Travelocity - Director of Marketing Services, Director of Travel Extras, Director of Merchandising. Five years learning how intent signals at scale - travel search, browsing, booking paths - translate into revenue decisions. The mental model that would define his later career takes shape here.
ezRez & Switchfly - VP of Product at ezRez, then COO at Switchfly, overseeing product, professional services, account management, and analytics. Operational depth beyond the analytics seat - how you actually run a technology business at scale.
Jumpshot - Becomes CEO of the San Francisco-based analytics company that tracked 160 billion monthly customer clicks. Jumpshot gave marketers an unprecedented view of cross-site consumer journeys across travel, retail, media, and ecommerce - behavioral data at a scale the industry had never seen before.
$22M Series A for Jumpshot. Baker demonstrates he can build a fundable analytics business from scratch - not just run one. The raise validates the thesis that behavioral click data is a product the market will pay for.
Edge by Ascential - CEO. Edge provides actionable sales-driving data, insights, and advisory solutions for global brands and retailers. Baker moves from behavioral analytics into the world of digital shelf intelligence - tracking content quality, search rankings, and competitive dynamics across every major online retailer.
Omnicom acquires Flywheel Digital for $835 million. The deal marks one of the largest acquisitions in digital commerce history. Flywheel had grown to serve 4,500+ brands, generating approximately $300M in annual revenue. Baker continues as CEO of Flywheel Ventures - the innovation and emerging commerce arm of the new entity.
Flywheel Ventures - Baker leads Flywheel's expansion into TikTok Shops and Walmart Marketplace commerce, building the tools and partnerships to help brands compete in the next generation of digital retail. Speaking at major conferences including Phocuswright 2025 in San Diego.
Achievements
Led Flywheel through its landmark acquisition by Omnicom Group in October 2023, one of the largest digital commerce transactions in industry history. The deal valued the business at nearly three times its revenue run rate.
At Jumpshot, built a behavioral analytics platform that tracked 160 billion monthly customer clicks - providing marketers with a cross-site view of consumer journeys that was effectively unprecedented in granularity at the time.
Secured a $22 million Series A for Jumpshot in 2015, validating the commercial case for behavioral click data as a standalone product and accelerating the company's growth across its core verticals.
Bylines in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur Magazine, and CEOWORLD - covering ecommerce strategy, marketing analytics, retail media, and digital commerce transformation at executive level.
Built and scaled Flywheel's client base to over 4,500 brands across Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shops, Alibaba, and other major digital marketplaces, spanning CPG, fashion, electronics, and beyond.
One of the first operators to articulate the distinction between retail media as a pure advertising play versus commerce infrastructure - a framing that has since become standard across the industry.
Deeper Story
There's an odd detail in Deren Baker's background that doesn't get mentioned in most press profiles: he studied American History and English Literature at Vanderbilt before heading to Duke for an MBA. Most tech executives wear their STEM credentials on their sleeve. Baker's undergraduate degree is in storytelling and context.
It shows up in how he writes. His pieces for Forbes and Harvard Business Review don't read like most executive bylines - breathless claims about transformation attached to nothing specific. Baker tends to build from evidence. A particular search trend. A specific conversion rate gap. A data point that pulls the reader toward a conclusion rather than announcing it.
The same instinct shows up in his operating choices. At Jumpshot, he didn't market the product as "big data for marketing." He let the 160 billion monthly clicks do the talking - the specificity of that number is its own argument. At Edge by Ascential, he focused the business on digital shelf intelligence: content quality scores, search rank tracking, competitive gaps - numbers that could be mapped directly to revenue impact for a brand manager trying to justify budget.
At Flywheel Ventures, Baker is now sitting at the intersection of several of the most interesting forces in commerce: TikTok's aggressive push into social shopping, Walmart's accelerating effort to build an advertising business to rival Amazon's, and the growing pressure on brands to prove that every dollar of retail media spend has a measurable return. He's been working on versions of these problems since 2002, when he was helping Travelocity figure out what a traveler really wanted based on what they clicked.
The channel changes. The question doesn't. Where is the customer, and what do they do next?
"TikTok Shop is the biggest commerce shift since Amazon Prime."- Deren Baker, CEO Flywheel Ventures
Writing & Media
Details
His Twitter and Facebook handle is still @edgeascential - a leftover from his Edge by Ascential days that he never updated. A small piece of digital archaeology from a career that moves fast.
Baker studied American History and English Literature at Vanderbilt before pivoting to analytics and ecommerce. He may be the most literary CEO in the retail media space.
At Jumpshot, his team tracked 160 billion monthly clicks - roughly 20 clicks for every person on earth, every month. The scale of that visibility over consumer behavior was unlike anything the industry had seen.
Flywheel's total fundraising across its history hit $895 million - with the final $835M coming from a single acquisition. A clean, full-cycle story from independent build to landmark exit.
Baker writes for Harvard Business Review and Entrepreneur Magazine while simultaneously running a 2,600-person commerce business inside Omnicom - making him an unusually prolific operator-author in a sector not known for thoughtful public writing.
His career started at Travelocity in 2002 - working in marketing services, travel extras, and merchandising. The same questions about consumer intent and click behavior that he explored there became the foundation for every company he built afterward.
Education
Tech Stack & Ecosystem
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