Behaviours Over Skills
Lori Goode, CMO of Index Exchange, holds a mandate that includes not just global marketing but learning and development, sustainability leadership, and diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. She came up through ad operations, product marketing at Microsoft and Facebook, and led global marketing and training for Amazon Advertising before joining Index. Her perspective is grounded in one discipline above all others: measurement.
“At Amazon, we measured literally everything. It was measuring to optimise, or to make the business case for additional resources.”
Lori Goode is the Chief Marketing Officer of Index Exchange, the sell-side platform that processes over 500 billion transactions a day and represents media owners ranging from web publishers to streaming TV providers and mobile app developers. She joined in 2020 and leads teams spanning brand, PR, digital marketing, events, product marketing, and learning and development.
Lori started her career in the restaurant industry before finding digital advertising in its earliest days, working in ad trafficking and media planning before moving into ad technology. She built her product marketing foundation at Microsoft Advertising, then joined Facebook where she led the complete ground-up rebuild and relaunch of the Atlas ad platform, pioneering the term people-based marketing. She then moved to Amazon, where she expanded from product marketing into leading all marketing and training for the global Amazon Advertising business, eventually overseeing new hire orientation for everyone in ads.
Her decision to hold learning and development alongside marketing at Index is deliberate. Having seen at every company how product knowledge alone does not make a great salesperson, she built a conviction that training holistically, including presentation skills, negotiation, and writing, is the only way to unlock the full commercial potential of a team. She also leads Index’s sustainability programme and is an active contributor to AdNet Zero and industry carbon reduction coalitions.
“I came in to build product marketing from scratch, and that is exactly what we did.”
“Every role I’ve had comes back to the same thing: how do you deliver value to the customer and train the teams doing it?”
Lori has held L&D alongside marketing at both Amazon and Index Exchange, and the logic is consistent in both cases. Product knowledge and marketing knowledge are necessary but not sufficient. The people delivering the brand experience need presentation skills, negotiation skills, and the ability to simplify complex things for customers who do not have the time or background to decode them. If you train people only on the product, you get knowledgeable people who cannot communicate. Marketing is the bridge.
“We measure meeting room utilisation. If we paid for a room, we measure how much it was used.”
Lori brought Amazon’s measurement culture to Index and built the analytics infrastructure from scratch. Sessions and new users on the website. Engagement and impressions across social. Email performance. Webinar attendance. Event ROI down to cost per attendee and cost per indexer. The meeting room statistic is not pedantry. It is how she makes the case for more or less space next year, and how she holds commercial teams accountable to shared investment decisions.
“I hire for behaviours, not skills. Skills can be taught. Behaviours cannot.”
Index Exchange’s five core values are baked into hiring, performance reviews, and how behaviour is evaluated across the company. Lori structures her team around the behaviours those values represent, with curiosity and ownership as non-negotiable. Her argument is consistent with her L&D philosophy: you can train someone on programmatic advertising. You cannot train someone to care deeply about whether their work is accurate and whether the person next to them has what they need.
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