Casale Media Rebrands To Index Exchange To Support Growth In Programmatic

Casale Media has officially rebranded to Index Exchange, appointed Andrew Casale the company's president and CEO, and hired a VP of marketing to run operations from its New York office.

"The evolution and previous name didn't fit the model," Casale told Media Daily News.

With the changes, Tom Polley becomes the company's vice president of marketing beginning Feb. 16. Before this, Polley held the role of executive producer at Mojiva, director of marketing at About.com, and director of production at AOL.

The transition began in late 2013 and early 2014, but the company has just begun to rebrand the name. Through the evolution, most clients still referred to the company as Casale, although softly introducing the Index name.

The programmatic ad process allowed Index Exchange to eliminate its media sales team responsible for procuring requests for proposals from major media agencies on behalf of their clients to procure media budgets, gain insertion orders and go live. The sales teams now reside on the publisher's side.

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Increasingly, the media sale is becoming technology driven, Casale said. "We now support the sales effort, where the publisher reaches out to the buyer, through our tech services team and technical account management group," he said. "Think of us as backup for support when things become very programmatic."

Index Exchange, formerly Casale Media, ranked No. 4 in comScore's top 20 U.S. ad networks in December 2014, with 187,809 million unique visitors on desktop. The company publishers include Hearst Magazine, Ziff Davis, Daily Mail, as well as companies like Expedia and Kayak.  

The next step is building a more significant operating presence in New York. The team of a dozen should grow to 30 by the end of this year. Today, 130 employee support operations worldwide, with about 70% of revenue coming from the U.S., 20% from Europe and 10% from Canada.

Casale said the company's run rate is about $200 million annually, up "significantly from the prior year." He said that 2014 marked the first year the company ran entirely as a programmatic company, which produced a bump in revenue, "over and above what we saw in the past."

A key shift driving the name and business model change is more integrated partnership with clients. "The size of the wallet programmatic  and the opportunity to the business has become significant enough that it's not really viewed as a tool to sell what goes unallocated, but rather unify the effective exposure to the entire media stack," Casale said. "We're accomplishing that with finer integration into every system a publisher might have, such as their DMP, CRM and BI tools, so it becomes seamless and received in the background."

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