HOLLYWOOD, Florida – On the heels of his company’s expanded partnership with AppNexus, Index Exchange President & CEO Andrew Casale reflects on the benefits of focusing exclusively on supply side clients, becoming “an infrastructure” company and fostering adtech partnerships.
Until three years ago, Index Exchange was known as Casale Media, an early proponent of programmatic founded in 2001. Back then, “There was the dream of technology but a very manual process to transact” digital media buys with paper insertion orders, Casale recalls in an interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Meeting of the IAB.
“Programmatic emerged and to us, it felt like the right fit,” he adds.
Now Index Exchange is well beyond Casale Media’s roots in desktop display ads with lots of activity in mobile and video. Casale credits the company’s transformation in part to always being very clear about its role in the marketplace.
“We only serve publishers and media companies,” Casale says. “That’s a big deal. In adtech there are a lot of companies that focus on buy and sell.”
As a result of this approach, other tech companies are comfortable partnering with Index Exchange, including Google, which offers competing products. The new relationship with AppNexus expands the companies’ header bidding partnership to include support for server-to-server integrations, as MediaPost reports.
“Having a clear focus creates a breeding ground for partnerships,” Casale says. “They know what to expect from our company. We’re not going to enter the buy side. We’re not going to enter measurement.”
The company’s other major point of differentiation is that Index Exchange is “more of an infrastructure company” than just an adtech company, according to Casale. “We’ve made huge investments in servers and data centers all over the world and we continue to.”
Index Exchange has 300 employees, 165 of them engineering and technology. “Adtech companies should be more technology companies than just sales and marketing companies,” Casale says.
Based in New York and with offices in San Francisco and most recently London, Index Exchange’s engineering prowess is based on Toronto, which is “a little bit uncommon in adtech,” he adds.
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
