The pursuit of ad transparency: five minutes with… David Nelson
David Nelson, co-founder and CEO of Limelight Inc., has spent over two decades in digital media. Here, he shares his perspective on how automation, data, and collaboration are reshaping the relationship between publishers, advertisers, and technology.
Q: You’ve been part of the digital media landscape for more than two decades. What are the standout changes you’ve seen in our industry, and how have they impacted publishers?
A: Twenty years ago, digital was the experimental corner of the media plan – now it’s the foundation. And while programmatic brought efficiency, it also added layers of complexity that obscured how value moves through the supply chain.
For publishers, that shift has been both empowering and disruptive. Yes, they now have global buyer access and more monetisation routes than ever, but they’ve also had to manage an ecosystem burdened by opaque mechanics, duplicated auctions, and intermediaries taking disproportionate value.
However, we know publishers are becoming far more assertive. They’re prioritising transparency, investing in first-party data, and pushing back against inefficiency as a tax on yield and trust. The pendulum is swinging back toward quality, control, and sustainability.
Q: How do you see the current state of programmatic affecting publishers, particularly those balancing audience growth with sustainable revenues?
A: Programmatic forced publishers to become operationally sophisticated businesses. It’s no longer just about audience and content; today it’s about how efficiently you manage the systems and economics around monetisation. The market is also dealing with significant noise – for instance signal loss, ID volatility, supply-path bloat – and that’s made efficiency and supply-side curation absolutely central.
So the publishers who succeed will be those who maintain scale but focus their energy on clean, authenticated supply paths and curated demand. They reclaim value by ensuring their inventory isn’t diluted by hidden fees or poor-quality buyers. Programmatic can serve premium content brilliantly, but only when the supply chain respects that value.
Q: Automation and AI are reshaping the industry. What practical impact do you think that will have on publishers and their operations?
A: Publishers have been automating yield decisions, workflow and reporting for years, but what’s changing is the level of intelligence built into those systems. AI can optimise delivery, identify patterns, and even predict audience behaviour at a scale that humans simply can’t replicate. But AI is only as good as the data you feed it. Our recent findings make it clear that clean supply paths and high-quality signals significantly improve AI-driven decisioning. If you put noisy, duplicated or low-integrity data into an optimisation model, it will misfire.
And crucially, AI still can’t understand editorial values, audience nuance, or the strategic objectives behind a publisher’s brand. Human oversight remains essential – not just to steer the system, but to contextualise its output and uphold standards. The future is hybrid: AI for scale and speed, and humans for judgement and integrity.
Q: Transparency and trust continue to be major talking points in adtech. How can publishers realistically achieve greater clarity over their data and revenues?
A: For publishers, transparency starts with visibility. You can’t optimise what you can’t see, so the first step is understanding exactly where your inventory is being traded, who’s involved in each transaction, what each intermediary contributes – or takes away.
Also, buyers want authenticated supply paths, verifiable quality, and fewer unknown deltas. So the more publishers can surface clean, traceable routes – and eliminate circular trading or black-box fees – the more confidence they instil in advertisers.
And then of course there’s the environmental aspect of transparency: inefficient supply chains generate unnecessary server load and avoidable carbon emissions, whereas cleaner paths improve both yield and sustainability.
Q: With third-party cookies disappearing, what do you think will define successful publisher strategies in the next few years?
A: What’s emerging is an identity-agnostic approach to targeting – one that values audience intent and contextual relevance over individual identifiers. There will always be new identifiers and solutions, but the fundamentals remain: understand your audience, protect your data, and articulate the value of your environment. And importantly, curated demand becomes more valuable in an ID-volatile world because knowing who your buyers are protects revenue and trust.
Q: The industry talks a lot about collaboration between publishers, advertisers, and tech partners. What does real collaboration look like to you?
A: True collaboration is when all sides have aligned incentives and a shared understanding of value. Too often, partnerships in adtech are transactional – driven by short-term metrics or opaque revenue shares. What we’re beginning to see now is more maturity. Publishers are asking harder questions, advertisers are demanding clarity, and technology partners are being held accountable for outcomes.
It goes back to transparency (on costs, outcomes, and sustainability), honesty about trade-offs, and shared visibility into performance. When everyone in the chain can see what the others are trying to achieve, that’s when innovation wins through.
Q: What advice would you give to someone just starting out in programmatic or digital media today?
A: If something sounds complicated, whoever’s explaining it probably hasn’t understood it themselves. This industry often makes simple things sound technical, but the fundamentals are straightforward: you’re connecting audiences, content and advertisers in a way that creates value for all three.
So ask questions, challenge jargon, and never stop learning. The technology will change constantly, but curiosity and authenticity never go out of style. And remember, it’s still a people business. The relationships you build now will matter more than any algorithm you work with.
Q: What’s on the horizon for Limelight Inc?
A: One of our headline innovations this year is the Adaptive Rules Center (ARC), which was born from watching our CS team repeating the same optimisations for clients. It was a huge time drain, and I thought surely there’s a better way. ARC lets clients build their own optimisation logic – without engineering resources – and apply it directly to their trading workflow.
A year or two ago, a demand partner might have accepted a two-week optimisation period for 15,000 QPS. Today, they need to see performance immediately. So you can start small, with minimal QPS – and the platform automatically scales performance up or down in real time.
As for the future, we see three directions for ARC:
- Expanding from the demand side into the supply side, using adaptive rules to validate supply paths, check transparency, and optimise bid floors.
- Improving visibility and explainability – eliminating the “black box” frustration around AI by surfacing decisions and logic in human-readable ways – particularly useful for agencies reporting to clients.
- Supporting real-time transparency and auditability, making it easier for our partners to understand not just what works, but why.
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