This has been another defining year for programmatic. The industry is evolving at unprecedented speed, driven by a collective push for greater efficiency, smarter decisioning, and higher-quality outcomes across the open internet.
Our long-standing vision of total market efficiency has never been more relevant. It’s rooted in driving better outcomes for all parties: increasing working media, delivering more value to marketers, and fostering innovation for a healthier, more competitive ecosystem.
In 2025, we made meaningful progress toward that vision as the sell-side decisioning movement rooted itself at scale.
As AI and agentic systems quickly reshape how programmatic decisions are made, demand for outcome-driven, high-quality inventory has only intensified. And as the compute required to support AI grows, so does the need for more efficient ways to surface value.
Sell-side decisioning is built for this moment.
Applying intelligence closer to the impression—where signals are strongest and context is clearest—enables faster, more precise decisions and unlocks a wealth of new opportunities on both sides of the transaction. Buyers can optimize every individual impression to deliver the right message in the highest-quality environment. Media owners can better demonstrate the full value of their inventory and capture more revenue from every impression.
Index Marketplaces has become the core engine powering this shift. Adoption tripled year over year, and the platform now supports hundreds of millions of global daily impressions.
This year, we introduced containerized integrations with several Marketplace partners like Chalice, inPowered AI, and Anonymised, enabling real-time, model-driven decisioning directly within the exchange. Every millisecond matters, and bringing this intelligence closer to the transaction meaningfully boosts both efficiency and performance.
We also expanded Marketplaces with the launch of our Data Vendor Ecosystem with partners like IRIS.TV, LiveRamp, Gracenote, Experian, and Samba TV. For the first time at Index, media buyers and Marketplace partners can activate high-quality, privacy-aware audience and contextual data directly on the sell side, without added fees or custom integrations. This creates a more transparent and efficient path to precision, while ensuring every data dollar flows directly to the data provider and the media owner’s inventory.
Streaming TV had a transformative year as well, with media owners bringing a surge of live sports inventory into programmatic. The opportunity is enormous. Brands of all sizes can now show up in premium live moments, and media owners can better monetize their most valuable content.
But live streaming also exposes long-standing technical gaps. Sudden viewership spikes trigger millions of simultaneous ad requests, and ad breaks often appear unpredictably. Legacy infrastructure wasn’t built for this volatility, resulting in missed impressions and lost revenue. Once again, this underscores the need for modern, scalable programmatic systems and strong technical standards.
When we made the decision back in 2021 to rearchitect our exchange from the ground up, we knew the future of programmatic would demand a more efficient, omnichannel platform. But even then, it was hard to imagine just how quickly the landscape would shift.
That investment is what enabled us to deliver innovations that now define our trajectory. It laid the foundations for Marketplaces, containerized solutions, and the technical resilience to support the scale and volatility of today’s live streaming environment.
We continued to partner closely with the IAB Tech Lab this year to advance industry standards. The Live Event Ad Playbook (LEAP) introduces guidance to improve reliability, maximize monetization, and elevate the live streaming experience. And the Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF) brings a standardized approach to containerized real-time bidding, allowing the components of a programmatic transaction to operate within the same virtual environment, dramatically accelerating auction speed. Programmatic is shifting from operating at milliseconds to microseconds, and ARTF marks a significant milestone toward real-time, agentic decisioning.
To support our accelerating business, we continued to strengthen our leadership bench, welcoming Chief Customer Officer Marybeth McGaugh and several other powerhouse leaders across product, engineering, sales, and marketing. Their expertise expands our ability to scale and reinforces our commitment to building a trusted exchange that delivers long-term value to media owners, marketers, and partners.
As we look to 2026, our focus is clear: continue elevating ad tech to exceptional standards, powering a more transparent, efficient, and quality-driven future. These principles form the foundation for the next era of programmatic—and the opportunity ahead has never been more promising.
Thank you for your ongoing trust and collaboration. We’re proud to build this future together.
We wish you a joyful holiday season and a wonderful start to the new year.
Andrew Casale
President and CEO
See how we’re raising the standard for quality, efficiency, and transparency across every channel.
