500 billion daily transactions powering the open web that most brands still overlook.

I'm responsible for marketing globally, but I also lead the learning and development teams as well as the executive sponsor for both sustainability and for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. It's a lot. The thread through all of it is that I think about behaviours and outcomes more than I think about narrow functional ownership.

Index Exchange has been around for over twenty years. It's a sell-side ad-technology platform. Andrew Casale, the founder, was a teenager when he started developing content for the web. He became a publisher, became obsessed with the lack of revenue tools for publishers, built an ad network, and then read the writing on the wall when real-time bidding arrived: the IO-based model was going to die. He pivoted the business to programmatic, which was a significant directional swing. Today the technology processes about 500 billion transactions a day. To put that in scale, in 2023 we processed more than double what Visa does in a year.

I came in in 2020 partly to stand up a product marketing organisation. We were work-from-home, and Index had been a heavily event-driven marketing organisation pre-pandemic. The event channel disappeared, so we had to bolster others. Everyone went to webinars and virtual events, and then everyone got sick of those, so the broader market was experimenting with new channels at the same time we were.

The product marketing build was about behaviour change across product, engineering, commercial, and the existing marketing team. Without product marketing, the path is often product-straight-to-commercial: we have a product, it's launching today, let me tell you about it really quickly. We stood up processes that involved product marketing early in the roadmap, made it the translation layer between product, commercial, and the rest of marketing, and gave it the quarterback role: here's what's coming, here's when, here's who needs to care, and here's how we'll promote it.

At Amazon you measure literally everything. Not for measurement's sake; measurement is for optimisation, or for the business case for additional resources. When I came to Index, there wasn't the same emphasis on measuring marketing output and activity, so we built it. Website sessions, new versus returning users, time spent, user paths. Social across all channels: engagement, views, impressions, followers. Emails. Webinars. And, from an event standpoint, we measure everything from meeting-room utilisation.

The first time I say that, people think I'm a little fanatical about measurement. From a planning perspective it matters. If the commercial team asks for a bigger event footprint next year, the answer is informed: how many people did we send, how many meetings, how many people in those meetings, how useful were the rooms, what's the cost per attendee, what's the cost per Indexer. It tells us how big the space should be and creates the picture for commercial colleagues about what was used.

We're heavy on educational content because our industry is so complex. People often don't want to admit when they don't know something, especially in emerging technologies. We launched a video programme last year called Index Explains, breaking big concepts down into roughly five-minute videos. It's been hugely successful for us, and a sizeable share of the YouTube viewership is from people Googling foundational questions like what is streaming TV? The educational programme is doing several jobs at once: it's primary marketing, it's employer-brand, it's talent acquisition. If you're a marketer not thinking about all those use cases at once, you're under-using the asset.

Index works with media owners (web publishers, broadcasters, streaming TV providers, mobile app developers), demand-side platforms, ad agencies, brands, and an ecosystem of technology partners. Our customer set, in effect, is the entire ecosystem. And then within each customer there are multiple personas, including users of the platform who aren't formally decision-makers but who still need to be influenced. The marketing team has to create multiple versions of each piece of content because it travels through different commercial teams to different audiences with different motivations. Going to a DSP, a publisher, or an agency requires three different versions of the same idea.

A couple of years ago we audited what we were already doing around sustainability and broke it into five pillars: data centres (probably the largest portion of our carbon emissions); product and technology (when we launched the new exchange a couple of years ago it came with significant carbon-load efficiencies); industry collaboration with bodies like AdNet Zero, IAB, and others; employee programmes including volunteer days and donation matching; and operations (B-Corp-certified swag, LED-certified buildings). We onboarded a platform to measure emissions across the company. We're using 2023 as the baseline and working on reduction plans.

We're trying to do enough. There's good momentum building through AdNet Zero, the IAB, the GARM framework, Scope3, and other partners working on common goals. The line I keep coming back to: this is not an area to compete in. It's an area to collaborate in, because if any of us loses, all of us lose. There's real effort across many different types of companies. It will take all of us to get to the goal. If we back out, none of us reach it. SBTi targets across the industry by 2044 is my biggest wish. That's far enough out that we should all have made significant progress collectively. It's the most important thing, and it isn't necessarily technology.

I pay attention to behaviours, not skills. Skills can generally be taught; behaviours are hard to teach or change. We hire against core values: support each other, it matters; launching is fun, it's the landing that counts; build trust, and others. Build trust is a hard value to teach. From a behaviour perspective, ownership matters: the sense of being empowered to see something through. Curiosity. Integrity, high standards. I can teach someone how to send an email. I can teach them how to write content; tools help if they're not great. The behaviour side, the human side, is much harder. So I hire for that.

It's quite rare, and I often correct people who assume L&D sits under marketing. They are two separate organisations and I happen to lead both. It started for me at Amazon, where I led product marketing and was then asked to lead sales training. Sales training started as onboarding and product training for the sales team, then grew into customer training and soft skills training, because if a salesperson can't present, can't negotiate, or can't write a simple email, the product knowledge doesn't matter. By the time I left Amazon I was leading new-hire orientation for everyone in the ads business. The same orientation: train holistically, evolve the person, not the single skill. At Index, the CEO was interested in that experience, and L&D was being built out as I joined.

The thread back to marketing is empathy for the audience on the other side of the conversation. You're telling a story in a way the other person will internalise. The story for a salesperson is told differently from the story for an engineer. That's the same discipline we apply to customers; Index Explains is built on the same principle.

People are looking for innovation. This year feels more connected than the last few. There's value in live conversation and brainstorming; we've had two- and three-hour in-person meetings with partners and potential partners over the past few weeks, which would have been hard to imagine three years ago. What I think Index does well is listening to customers and co-developing solutions. We launched a new platform at the end of 2021 and spent 2022 learning streaming TV deeply. We weren't in streaming TV before. By being second or third mover we could listen to enough people to identify what wasn't being solved for by the existing solutions, and leapfrog into those gaps. Streaming TV is now half of our business, and we're co-authoring standards around live events programmatically.

The fastest-growing product we've ever launched is Marketplaces, which went into closed beta in January. It's about building an ecosystem of partners onboarded efficiently into Index: data providers, curators, AI companies. The conversations every day are about new use cases partners are bringing to us.