Lori Goode, CMO at Index Exchange, on building a product marketing function from scratch during the pandemic, why company culture is competitive infrastructure rather than a soft benefit, and why the CMO role at an ad tech company increasingly spans learning and development, DEI, and sustainability alongside marketing.
"My job is to think about the customer and how we give them the experience they need. And then how do we train everyone delivering that experience."
Why product marketing is the connective tissue between engineering and commercial, and why culture is competitive infrastructure
Lori Goode joined Index Exchange as its first-ever CMO in 2020, during the pandemic, and immediately faced two simultaneous challenges: build a product marketing organisation that did not yet exist in a company that had been moving products directly from engineering to sales, and do it without the benefit of in-person onboarding, team building, or face-to-face market presence in an industry that had historically been events-driven.
In this conversation she explains why the product marketing function exists, what goes wrong without it, and how she built it from zero inside a company with twenty years of history but no formal bridge between product and commercial. She also talks about her unusually broad CMO remit at Index, which spans learning and development, sustainability, and DEI alongside the marketing function, and why she sees those connections as natural extensions of the same discipline: understanding the customer, articulating value, and building the infrastructure that delivers it consistently.
"Index Exchange today is a sell-side platform. We represent media owners and experience makers, whether that is broadcasters, streaming TV providers, web-based publishers, or mobile app developers, and we help them monetise their inventory at incredible scale. From a technology perspective, we process about 500 billion transactions a day. In 2023, Index processed almost more than double what Visa processes in a year."
The scale of what a sell-side platform does operationally is often invisible to the brands and agencies that interact with it commercially. Goode's framing of the Index mission as protecting the open web, ensuring that publishers can make their content freely available because they can monetise it effectively through programmatic advertising, connects the commercial function to a broader purpose that she uses to attract talent and articulate value to partners.
"Without product marketing, sometimes it is product straight to commercial. Hey, we have a product and it is launching today. Let me tell you about it really quickly. And that is what was happening. And so building product marketing meant putting the right people in place to bridge product teams, engineering teams, commercial teams, and the existing marketing team."
Goode describes the pre-product-marketing state at Index as a symptom of a technology company where engineers and product managers are doing excellent work but the translation of that work into commercial value is inconsistent and reactive. Product marketing provides the sequencing, the messaging, the enablement, and the positioning that turns a product capability into a commercially actionable proposition. Without it, launches are noisy, sales teams are unprepared, and customers miss the value that was built for them.
"I think Index was a heavily event-driven marketing organisation pre-pandemic. And obviously in the pandemic, that went away. And so really thinking about how do you then adapt your strategy to start to bolster some other channels to effectively reach your audiences. That was a challenge for everyone at the time."
The forced diversification of Index Exchange's marketing mix during the pandemic had a lasting positive effect. Channels and approaches that had been deprioritised in favour of events were developed and tested. When events returned, the marketing function was more capable across a broader range of touchpoints and less dependent on the periodic intensity of the conference circuit. Goode describes the experience as accelerating a transition that would have happened eventually but now happened under pressure.
"There are five core values. Support each other. It matters. Launching is fun, it is the landing that counts. These are core values that Indexers live and breathe every single day. We hire against those core values. They are in performance reviews. In a lot of ways, I structured some of my team around behaviours that we like to see within the company."
The specificity of Index's values is what makes them actionable. Launching is fun, it is the landing that counts is a philosophy about customer success, not a slogan. It tells employees that the work does not end at launch, that the measure of success is whether what was built actually delivers for the people it was built for. Hiring against values rather than just skills creates a team with a shared operating system that produces consistent customer experience more reliably than any process manual.
"I am responsible for marketing globally, but I also lead the learning and development teams as well as the executive lead for sustainability and for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. And interestingly, even when I was in the restaurant business, the things that I naturally gravitated towards in every role were thinking about the customer and how do we give customers the experience they need, and how do we then train the teams and everyone else delivering that experience."
Goode frames the breadth of her remit not as scope creep but as a coherent expression of a single underlying discipline. Training, DEI, and sustainability all connect to the same root question: what kind of organisation do we want to be, and how do we make that real in the day-to-day experience of employees and customers? The CMO is increasingly the executive responsible for the external expression of what a company is, which naturally extends to how it develops its people and how it treats its responsibilities to the world.
"Culture is very ingrained in our DNA. We hire against those core values."
Host Tell me a little bit about Index. Why do you exist and what problems do you look to solve?
Goode Index Exchange has been around for over 20 years. It is an ad technology platform and it has evolved in that 20 years. Our founder started the company and became really obsessed with thinking about how to give publishers a really great set of solutions that allowed them to make the most revenue they possibly could so that they could continue to make their content free and publicly available. He shifted the business model to programmatic buying when real-time bidding started to become more in vogue. Index Exchange today is a sell-side platform. We represent media owners and experience makers and help them monetise their inventory. We process about 500 billion transactions a day.
Host Tell me about your career and how you brought all of that experience to this role.
Goode Even when I was in the restaurant business, the things I naturally gravitated towards were thinking about the customer and how do we give customers the experience they need and deserve. And then how do we scale and articulate and deliver that value so they understand it. And then how do we train the teams and everyone else delivering that experience. That is what I have done in almost every role no matter what role I held.
Host Why did you build a product marketing function from scratch?
Goode Without product marketing, sometimes it is product straight to commercial. Hey, we have a product and it is launching today. Let me tell you about it really quickly. That was happening. And so building product marketing meant putting the right people in place to bridge product teams, engineering teams, commercial teams, and the existing marketing team to show them a different way of doing things. It took time to build. Without the pandemic, I think I could have moved faster and made decisions differently.
Host How did the pandemic force a change in your marketing approach?
Goode Index was a heavily event-driven marketing organisation pre-pandemic. Obviously in the pandemic that went away. And so really thinking about how do you adapt your strategy to start to bolster other channels to effectively reach your audiences. That was a challenge for everyone. Most people went to webinars and virtual events and then everyone got sick of them. So most people were really trying to adapt and experiment with new ways of reaching their customers.
Host Tell me about the relationship between company culture and marketing at Index.
Goode There are five core values. They are very ingrained in our DNA. Core values that Indexers live and breathe every single day. We hire against those core values. They are in performance reviews. They are how we articulate what we see in behaviour and action within the company. In a lot of ways I have structured some of my team around behaviours that we like to see within the company that then translate to success for Index, almost a code for how we operate.
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