Lizzie Komar, Index Exchange director of research and insights
Index Exchange has hired former AdExchanger Research analyst Lizzie Komar to spearhead a new digital advertising research division. The new business unit will analyze the billions of transactions that take place across its programmatic publisher platform each month to make high-level programmatic insights more accessible to advertisers and publishers.
Index hired Komar as director of research and insights earlier this month. She’s researched trends in programmatic and ad tech since 2011, first as an analyst at Forrester Research and then at AdExchanger, where she helped fellow Forrester alumna and mentor Joanna O’Connell develop the company’s highly successful business intelligence division, AdExchanger Research.
Komar told Marketing that her primary role at Index will be to develop content for a new online portal called Knowledge Exchange, which is scheduled to launch sometime this fall.
Knowledge Exchange will leverage Index’s in-house data science team and trove of transaction processing data to report on industry-wide trends among programmatic publishers, media buyers and technology platforms. Index now auctions over 100 billion impressions per month globally on both public and private real-time ad exchanges, which gives it an eagle-eye view of the programmatic marketplace that not many companies can match.
“They see so much in terms of how publishers are monetizing their sites, how demand-side is bidding on inventory in their sites,” Komar said. “All of that data was kind of hidden, and shared with clients on an ad hoc basis. Our plan is to pull out the trends before our clients ask for them, to create research and content that people will use to understand not only ad tech, but really the dynamics of the programmatic marketplace.”
She said the new division’s primary mandate will be thought leadership that promotes public discussion, rather than business intelligence reports for specific clients.
“It’s going to be very public-focused,” she said. “A lot of this stuff, if it exists, lives behind a paywall today. There’s just so much good exchange (for lack of a better term) that can take place in this industry, that we don’t see happening that much.”
Index’s quarterly reports on programmatic media are already used by media outlets like AdExchanger and Media Post to cover high-level industry trends, like which advertisers and verticals are spending the most on programmatic, how much inventory publishers are auctioning on the exchanges, and how many buying platforms are competing for top market share. Komar said that she’ll be focusing a lot of her attention on continuing to develop and publicize these reports, including broadening them to non-U.S. markets where Index operates, such as Canada.
She said that some of the big trends she plans to cover in coming months are the emergence of private marketplaces as a dominant force in programmatic, and the growing enthusiasm among publishers for “header bidding,” a complex new technology that helps sellers centralize demand across multiple exchanges and networks.
