How to choose a programmatic partner (without giving away the keys)
Opinion
The co-founder of Limelight sets out a practical way to choose a programmatic partner – one that helps you curate quality supply, prove value to buyers, and adapt as identity, channels, and measurement keep shifting.
Choosing a programmatic partner used to feel like a purely technical decision. Does it plug in cleanly, scale, and handle the basics without drama? That checklist still matters, but it no longer tells you whether you’re buying leverage – or dependency.
Privacy changes, platform policy shifts and supply-path inefficiency have raised the bar on what buyers and publishers expect. Volume alone doesn’t win trust when the path is opaque, identity signals are volatile, and quality is hard to prove. Networks are being pushed towards a curatorial role, and that makes the partner behind the curtain far more consequential.
A partner brings technology, but also incentives, controls, and an operating model. If those foundations are misaligned, every feature becomes harder to trust when the market gets noisy. The safest way to choose is to test for independence, auditability, cross-channel coherence and pragmatic automation. This is how we suggest you go about it:
Start with incentives, not integrations
Most evaluations begin with integrations because they’re easy to tick off on a checklist. The harder truth is that incentives decide outcomes, especially when budgets tighten and pointed questions about quality are raised. Before you compare dashboards and endpoints, it’s worth clarifying how your partner makes money – and what they’re rewarded for.
If their margins improve when the supply path adds hops, or when you lose visibility, that can signal a structural problem. On the other hand, if their success is linked to yours, and they’re purely a platform provider (not a trading competitor that hides fees or maintains control), then you’ve found a stronger alignment.
Partner selection gets clearer when you treat it as an incentivisation question, rather than simply a software procurement exercise.
Take the conflict-of-interest test
Ask whether your partner trades media or sits on both sides of the table in any form. If it does, it may be buying or selling the same inventory, and that means it is effectively competing with you.
In this case, you’d need explicit safeguards in the contract, including transparency on fees, clear data-access terms, and a documented separation between trading and client teams.
Then look at how governance works in practice. Ask what you can actually audit, such as whether you can access supply-path logs, fee transparency and third-party verification, so you can prove quality to buyers. If the answers are unclear, there’s a risk of revenue leakage, buyer frustration, or publisher distrust.
Insist on transparency you can audit
Transparency is not simply a brand value, but an operational capability. You should be able to explain where impressions come from, how they’re packaged, and how money moves through the chain. That requires access to the right data and a partner who doesn’t treat access as a concession.
In practical terms, you’re looking for clear fee disclosure, consistent reporting, and the ability to investigate delivery at a granular level when needed. You also want flexibility around verification and measurement partners, because trust is easier to maintain when third parties can confirm what you’re claiming.
If a partner can’t support routine auditing, you’re choosing opacity, and that will eventually surface as commercial friction.
Overcome the channel challenge
CTV, audio, and DOOH aren’t side quests anymore; they’re part of how buyers actually plan. That shift creates a new expectation: that packaged supply should be cleaner, more comparable, and easier to measure across formats.
Forecasts in industry reporting have put programmatic DOOH spend at $2.2bn and programmatic audio at $2.3bn in 2025. Those numbers matter less than what they imply: that programmatic execution is spreading across environments with very different signals, creative rules, and definitions of success.
If your partner treats each channel as a reporting silo, you’ll spend your time reconciling reports instead of improving the packages you sell.
A better model is one where channels share controls and governance, even when the formats differ. You want standardised KPIs that make sense and unified reporting that doesn’t break when a plan spans web, video, CTV, and audio. That’s how you turn channel expansion into a package buyers actually trust.
Make sure the optimisation model is optimal
Yes, automation will always be necessary, but black-box automation is where it becomes a liability. The best optimisation decisions still depend on context, including what counts as quality for your buyers, which inventory to protect, and which trade-offs you’re willing to accept.
A strong partner helps you automate repeatable work while keeping strategic judgment in human hands.
One pragmatic approach is rules-based optimisation, which allows teams to set multi-dimensional logic across variables such as format, geography, device type, audience segments, and time of day. That kind of design is valuable because it’s explainable, testable and adjustable, even when the market changes. It also encourages healthier conversations with buyers, since you can describe how decisions are made, rather than asking them to trust decisions they can’t see.
Scale should work the same way. You want the ability to test efficiently, learn quickly, and then ramp with confidence, rather than flooding the market with volume and hoping performance catches up. When optimisation is transparent and scaling is controlled, a network can act like a curator with standards, rather than a middleman chasing throughput.
In the end, choosing the right partner comes down to a few non-negotiables. Incentives should reward transparency and long-term trust, rather than hidden take rates and forced dependence. The platform should support cross-channel packaging as a single operating model, and automation should be powerful while remaining accountable.
If those pieces are in place, the rest of the feature list becomes far easier to believe and, crucially, will let you stay in control.
James Macdonald is the co-founder and CRO of Limelight