How the Wrapper Won the Header: A Conversation With Index Exchange

It may sound like a joke, but Index Exchange has been coordinating trips to Toronto for numerous major publishers and DSPs to meet their squad of 200 engineers. Many a wiseacre would comment they’d rather avoid engineers entirely than travel long distances to meet them, but Index Index Exchange President and CEO Andrew Casale notes that these get-togethers have been essential in the development of the company’s header wrapper. 

“People don’t realize what and who is behind the tech,” he comments over a drink at the Miami Publisher Forum. “When we’re building a wrapper, there are 10 engineers working on it. That’s easy to say, but it’s hard to appreciate.”

Index attributes its header success to efforts like this to solicit the needs of the publishing community. The whole concept of a wrapper, Casale claims, was the idea of publishers—Index built it and continues to improve on it based on their requirements. And what do you know, that includes some incredible advances regarding bid architecture, working with ad libraries and pre-fetching—but with those same advancements come interesting new challenges. 

GAVIN DUNAWAY: The wrapper has come a long way in a short time; what are the most significant developments?

ANDREW CASALE: If you look at the earliest form of wrapper, it was basically, “Can you do a lot of what a publisher’s engineering team would have to do to integrate header bidders?” This meant taking API specs from third-party bidders, understanding each and coding them onto the site. Read each spec, understand it and integrate it. Set it up so they can all sit next to each other. That was a lot of work we were able to free up from a publisher’s engineering team. 

But that’s still the most basic implementation of header, and it might work with the most simplistic publisher pages: the page renders on load, the ad slots are all static, your fire up all the headers and they return bids. Easy. 

Now enter the new web—responsive design, infinite scroll, viewability-first implementations like smart loading. The web’s evolved quite a bit too in the last 16 months—most sites don’t work the same way they used to. The first big improvement to the wrapper was solving for those environmental challenges.

Read the rest of the interview at AdMonsters.com.