Andrew Casale isn’t here to make friends.
He’s not pitching a new acronym. He’s not rebranding the wheel. And he’s definitely not pretending that SSPs are the new AI.

The CEO of Index Exchange has something even rarer in ad tech than innovation: self-awareness. And if you listen closely, it sounds a lot like a man who's spent the last decade watching the industry trip over its own PowerPoint decks.

💥 “We could be labeled as being dumb, and that’s not wrong.”
That’s not me mocking him—that’s Casale himself, owning the “dumb pipe” insult like it’s a badge of honor stitched onto a North Face vest at a DSP summit.

Let’s rewind for a second. For the better part of a decade, SSPs were the infrastructure gremlins of the ad tech ecosystem—overworked, undercredited, and universally ignored unless something broke. They were the duct tape holding programmatic together, while DSPs got all the attention, budget, and keynote invites.

Being an SSP was like being the sound guy at Coachella—critical, invisible, and blamed when the mic cuts out.
And Casale? He’s been that guy. He built Index back in 2011 with the idea that exchanges were the “harder problem,” fully aware that “the infrastructure of programmatic was destined to be commoditized.”

Translation? He signed up for a thankless job, on purpose. And now, while other companies are out here shoving AI into their logos and pretending that curation is a religion, Index is quietly laying the fiber of the post-cookie open internet.

When I ask Casale if SSPs are finally getting smarter, he doesn’t even flinch. He says, “I don't think that we're trying to be a smart pipe.” In fact, he doubles down on the dumbness, insisting that Index’s real role is as the “supply infrastructure layer.” Not sexy. Not flashy. Definitely not the kind of thing that gets you a Cannes yacht party.

But it works.

And let’s be clear: this is intentional restraint, not a lack of ambition. Casale knows what the market needs—and what it pretends to need. While half the industry is out here chasing shiny objects and spinning up six competing “agentic AI models,” Index is focused on doing one thing: make transactions clean, fast, and traceable. No gimmicks, no mystery fees, and no unicorn blood required.

If ad tech were a high school, SSPs used to be the janitors. Now? Everyone’s trying to pretend they’re the guidance counselors, too. But Casale isn’t having it. He breaks down the current moment with surgical precision and a pinch of exhausted sarcasm.

📉 “CTV is just chaos in high definition.”

🔥 “MFA sites? Not publishers. They're traffic arbitrage factories with a blog fetish.”

And my personal favorite: “Curation? We don’t really use that term. It’s limiting.”

Limiting, yes—but also painfully vague. “Curation,” “enablement,” “signal reclamation”—this is the new industry gospel, made up mostly of recycled buzzwords duct-taped to old targeting strategies. But Casale's not drinking the Kool-AI. He’s too busy auditing the pipes to pour another round.

You want real talk about the industry's integrity problem? Casale gave it.

When I asked him about the Made-for-Advertising swamp the rest of the industry still tiptoes around, he didn’t blink. “We did not build the company to support active traffic arbitrage,” he told me. He calls MFA what it is: a pollution layer, not a publisher class.

And while others were hedging, backpedaling, or just pretending they couldn’t tell the difference between The New York Times and AI-generated headline farms, Index dropped the hammer and terminated them. No dramatic press release. No virtue signaling. Just a quiet execution of inventory that didn’t deserve to exist in the first place.

It wasn’t just a strategic move. It was a moral one.
🧼 “We built the company to support publishers.”
That’s the line. And unlike most players in this ecosystem, Casale actually seems to mean it.

You can’t talk about an identity shift without talking geography.
Yes, Casale packed his bags, kissed polite Toronto goodbye, and moved to New York—the land of sarcasm, sensory overload, and oat milk served by bartenders with opinions on SPO.

“I’ve definitely seen my fair share of rats,” he tells me casually, as if they’re just another feature of the ad tech ecosystem. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. Maybe several.

New York has become the gravitational center of ad tech post-pandemic. San Francisco is sunsetting; LA is busy streaming; and New York? It’s caffeinated, aggressive, and allergic to fluff. Which is exactly why Casale fits.

At one point in the interview, I ask Casale what lesson hit him hardest over the years. His answer?

📉 “There’s no prize for being early or first.”

This isn’t just philosophical. It’s brutally practical. Index, like many others, has had great ideas too soon. They’ve built solutions to problems that hadn’t gone viral yet. And as any founder will tell you, that’s just as fatal as being wrong.

Timing is everything. Build the right product at the wrong moment, and you’re not a visionary—you’re a cautionary tale. That kind of honesty is rare in an industry still bragging about 2015 pivots like they’re cutting-edge strategy.

In one of the weirdest turns, I ask him what would surprise his younger self the most. The answer?
“I got into yoga.”

Twenty-something Andrew would’ve mocked it. But today’s Casale sees the value. That might sound trivial, but in this industry? A CEO who meditates and doesn’t think AI is the cure for everything is practically a unicorn.

He doesn’t have hobbies. He doesn’t pretend to. What he does have is a love for ad tech so deep, he admits to spending mornings reading logs. Not dashboards. Logs. If that’s not commitment, I don’t know what is.

Andrew Casale isn’t trying to build a movement. He’s trying to build a functional market. While others are decorating their ad tech with emojis, NFTs, or virtue-signaling press releases, Index is patching the leaking plumbing of programmatic. Quietly. Effectively. Relentlessly.

He’s not here to curate your feelings.
He’s here to tell you that infrastructure matters, curation is code for confusion, and you probably shouldn’t be paying more for a key-value lookup than a Netflix subscription.

In the early years of programmatic advertising, infrastructure was an afterthought—a back-end necessity in a front-end-obsessed world. While DSPs dazzled buyers with dashboards and targeting talk, SSPs were expected to quietly route impressions like postal workers in the dark. Now, that’s changing.

As the ecosystem matures and hype fatigue sets in, a new thesis is taking hold: Infrastructure isn’t just important—it’s the whole game. The most powerful players aren’t the ones reinventing the wheel. They’re the ones keeping the engine running while everyone else chases the next acronym.

“The infrastructure of programmatic was destined to be commoditized,” says Andrew Casale, CEO of Index Exchange. It’s not a warning—it’s a prediction realized. As ad tech’s core functions—bidding, clearing, routing—become standardized, the space for differentiation shrinks. Margins compress. And the survivors are the ones who’ve prepared for this moment.

Casale doesn’t romanticize this. He’s pragmatic. He knows this isn't the golden age of massive take rates and mysterious margins. It's a utilities business now, and utilities scale by becoming invisible and indispensable.

The goal isn’t to fight commoditization—it’s to outlast it.

Across the industry, consolidation is thinning the herd. Once, there were over a hundred SSPs. Today, that number is far smaller—and shrinking. Casale puts it bluntly: “There was unlikely to be a case where we had a hundred exchanges all taking huge margins and the market looked healthy.”

Index’s position is clear: the market is rationalizing. In this environment, survival isn’t about scale alone. It’s about efficiency at scale.

Casale walks through the math. Imagine reducing 100 SSPs to 10. Each of those 10 now handles 10x the volume. But here’s the twist—unlike variable-cost businesses, the cost of running auctions doesn’t scale linearly. “The auction is run whether a transaction occurs or not,” he says. “If suddenly tomorrow we clear 10 times as many transactions, quite frankly, we can be 10 times cheaper. That’s just math.”

This is the fundamental shift: programmatic isn't priced on value anymore—it's priced on volume and throughput.

Index’s entire strategy now centers around this realization. While competitors continue layering on AI, curation overlays, and bespoke optimization, Casale and team have doubled down on running a clean, efficient exchange. They’re not selling creative vision or strategic consulting. They’re selling uptime, accuracy, and transaction integrity.

And they’re not adding a fee every time they turn on a new toggle.

“When we activate data, we don’t add another fee,” Casale explains. “To us, it’s a key-value lookup. It’s the most trivial thing we do.” That’s a quiet rebuke to the ecosystem players who treat basic functionality as a monetization event.

This is more than cost discipline. It’s a worldview: infrastructure should not be a profit center for things that should already be table stakes.

This low-margin, high-integrity model also aligns with buyer behavior. As the “efficiency era” replaces the “growth era,” media buyers want fewer buzzwords and more receipts. Casale notes that Index has offered log-level audit APIs—called CAL—for years. “Historically, they were seldom used. In the last year or two, that’s changed.” Buyers are now demanding transparency not just in theory, but in implementation.

What used to be a nice-to-have is becoming a prerequisite. “We’re seeing studies start at the marketer’s wallet and end at the publisher,” Casale says. Index’s approach—offering full transparency of its fee, transaction by transaction—may not be exciting. But it’s a trust signal in an industry built on skepticism.

And that trust is becoming valuable currency.

Ironically, this era of commoditized infrastructure may be the catalyst for innovation—not the enemy of it. Just as cloud computing turned Amazon Web Services into the scaffolding for thousands of startups, programmatic’s boring pipes could become the foundation for a new generation of agile, vertical-specific tools.

Casale nods to this indirectly. “Once you have massively efficient transactional platforms, then you can start to build new startups on top.” He sees a world where the core exchange layer isn’t replicated—it’s used. Smart companies won’t waste time building SSPs or DSPs. They’ll build value-added services that ride on top of clean infrastructure.

And the most interesting businesses of the next 10 years? They’ll be built on someone else’s plumbing.

Ad tech’s next chapter won’t be written by those who shout the loudest about signal loss, or who launch a new “agentic” framework every quarter. It’ll be shaped by those who run auctions faster, with lower fees, and fewer hops.

The companies that win won't be the ones with the coolest UI—they’ll be the ones who eliminate 200 milliseconds no one ever sees. They’ll be the ones who make margins so thin that no CFO even bothers to ask what they’re paying. And when that happens, the flashy features and strategic narratives won’t matter.

Because at scale, only two things matter: speed and cost.

In Casale’s telling, there’s no shame in being a dumb pipe. In fact, there’s power in it. Power in knowing that the market doesn’t need another “smart” platform—it needs infrastructure that works, transparently, relentlessly, and at industrial scale.

In his words: “The lighter our category is, the more we can scale. And the more efficiency we can create.”

So while some companies chase the next “visionary” layer, Index Exchange is betting on the most boring thing in the business: clean, efficient transactions.

And that might just be the smartest move of all.

For over a decade, ad tech companies have strutted around like finance bros with daddy’s Amex, charging double-digit take rates for doing little more than showing up with a PowerPoint and a seat on the supply chain.

Those days? 🔪 They’re numbered.

The 15% margin era—the one where everyone quietly added a little "processing fee" between the impression and the invoice—is on life support. And Andrew Casale, CEO of Index Exchange, is out here pulling the plug with the calm demeanor of someone who’s seen too many inflated receipts and not enough accountability.

That’s Casale, practically shrugging, like the guy at the murder scene pointing to the murder weapon and saying, “It’s been sitting here the whole time.”

Let’s be real. Ad tech is notorious for playing a game I like to call “Hide the Take Rate.” A little markup here, a tiny bid-shading twist there, and suddenly you’re staring at a 47% media efficiency ratio and wondering how your CPM turned into a ransom note.

For years, everyone got away with it because no one looked too closely. CFOs trusted CMOs, CMOs trusted their DSPs, and DSPs trusted that no one actually read the logs. But Casale’s seen the shift. He says what we all know but few admit: “In the last year or two, we’re getting a lot more requests for log-level data.”

Translation: Buyers finally found the flashlight—and they’re shining it directly into the pipes.

To his credit, Casale says Index offered this visibility all along—CAL APIs, client audit logs, the full ledger of every transaction, fees included. The tools were there. No one used them. “Historically... seldom used,” he says, with the dry fatigue of someone who once built the equivalent of a home security system only to watch everyone leave the door unlocked.

Now, those same buyers are suddenly obsessed with fee breakdowns and asking, “Wait, why am I paying 3x for a key-value lookup?”

Casale’s take? Don’t ask him to clap for doing the basics. “To us, it’s a key-value lookup. It’s the most trivial thing we do.” So why charge a fee for it? They don’t. Because Index thinks effort should match value—a wild concept in an industry that once charged $10 CPMs to serve 728x90s on recipe blogs.

Casale knows what happens when you jump ahead too early. He’s done it. “There’s no prizes for being first—if you get your timing wrong, it can cripple you.” And in the context of transparency, Index was the early kid with receipts, yelling into the void while everyone else was faking scale and printing margin.

Now that the buyer side has caught up, the ecosystem is playing catch-up with words like “efficiency,” “supply path,” and “value return.” Cute. But Casale isn’t new here. He’s just been quietly running the math while everyone else was selling buzzwords in bulk.

So what happens when margins drop to Visa-level—1.5%, maybe 2% if you say please?

Casale isn’t panicking. In fact, he’s welcoming it. He walks through the logic like a guy who’s had this argument in his head (and on his whiteboard) for years. If 100 SSPs consolidate into 10, and the 10 now process all the volume, they don’t incur 10x the cost. The auction runs whether or not it clears. So if you're running 10x more transactions, guess what? "Quite frankly, we can be 10 times cheaper.”

That’s not just strategy. That’s a blunt-force economics lesson for anyone still clinging to bloated pricing models like they’re artisanal.

So, who survives in this razor-thin margin future?

🟢 Companies that can run millions of transactions without throwing a tantrum over AWS bills.
🔴 Companies charging $2 CPM just to filter a site list through GPT.

Casale doesn’t say names. He doesn’t have to. Anyone charging opaque “data activation” fees to map a user ID to a browser is on borrowed time.

And as he puts it, “The original business models that were spawned to govern [ad tech]... are now subject to great change.” In polite Canadian, that’s a funeral notice.

If there’s a gospel emerging from Index Exchange, it’s this: You should not be rewarded for bloating the chain. You should be rewarded for compressing it. Casale’s vision isn’t sexy, but it’s surgical—less about disruption and more about stripping ad tech down to its operational bones.

That means real-time auctions that don’t spike your infrastructure costs. That means no surcharge for looking up a value. That means fees based on work, not legacy expectations.

It’s boring. It’s brutal. And it’s exactly what the industry needs.

The 15% fee is dying—not because of some philosophical awakening, but because the buyers finally care and the pipes finally matter. The next generation of ad tech winners won’t be the ones who charge the most. They’ll be the ones who charge the least—because they can afford to.

Casale saw it coming. He’s still here. Most won’t be.

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