MarTech Top Voice: Interview with Limelight Inc.’s James Macdonald

Today’s MarTech Top Voice features the Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Limelight Inc., James Macdonald.

As we look ahead to 2025, programmatic advertising continues to be a driving force in the digital marketing landscape, fueled by data and automation. Its ability to deliver targeted, performance-driven campaigns has revolutionized how businesses connect with consumers, making it an essential tool for advertisers. As the programmatic ecosystem has rapidly expanded, it has become increasingly complex, with new technologies, strategies, and regulatory challenges emerging. For ad networks and other players in the programmatic space, this growth has brought about several key challenges:

1) delivering exceptional service at competitive prices,

2) developing cutting-edge technology,

3) staying ahead of evolving regulations, and

4) providing consistent incremental revenue for clients.

Many ad networks find these hurdles difficult to overcome, especially given the high costs and expertise required to build and maintain in-house solutions.

The answer to these challenges often lies in white-label programmatic platforms.

Join us as we explore James’ insights on his AdTec journey and the prospects of partnerships in the digital advertising markets.

MarTech Insights (MTI): Please tell us about your AdTech journey and how you started with Limelight.

James: I started in newspapers on Fleet Street before the days of PCs and the internet, when it was just ‘smile and dial’. Over the years I’ve had jobs in many verticals and areas, including agency side, publisher side, as well as ad networks.

I joined Unanimis as Head of Mobile just as mobile advertising and media were emerging, and went on to join O2 Media (Telefonica) as Sales Director just as the iPhone launched in the UK. After that, I spent a few years in the USA, developing and launching Mobile DSPs.
 

When I returned to the UK, the market had developed and I moved into consulting and teamed up with [Limelight co-founder and CEO] David Nelson. We specialize in helping to deliver and scale supply and demand engagements, allied to best practice operations and technology. Our approach was to do this as a service for our clients.

It was very much a natural progression for us to want to distill the experience, market knowledge, contact book, and values in our “own shop”. As a result, we started to look closely at the platform landscape and the challenges, both from an economic and a functional perspective. There were some good white-label products in the market, but none really offered a clear advantage or holistic approach.

As a result of 12 months’ R&D we emerged with a Beta and MVP platform which was the early version of Limelight. We made a clear decision to be a software-led, tech-only, white-label business that enables partners to run their own Exchange, SSP, network or DSP, and also at the same time we caught the wave of OpenRTB, and were one of the first fully oRTB-enabled platforms with no capacity issues or limitations on Queries Per Second. 

Seven years on, we have grown to a position where we have hundreds of global partners, with several hundred millions of dollars of trade powered by Limelight. We have achieved this by focusing on delivering function-rich, problem-solving, future-proof technology that is fairly priced and, most importantly, with great customer service and support for our clients.

MTI: How have AdTech partnerships evolved in the post-pandemic years? Could you tell us how AdTech partnerships impact growth?

James: The world keeps getting smaller, and AdTech partnerships have evolved massively since the pandemic. There’s been a cultural shift whereby people are more remote in terms of location, but more involved in each other’s lives on a daily basis. 

In terms of impacting growth, AdTech always finds a way. It is predisposed to finding solutions to people’s challenges in a fast-changing marketplace. Good AdTech partnerships enable companies to reach their ambitions and manage scalability goals. Whether that’s building something in-house, with all the challenges around development costs and future-proofing, or working with a respected, flexible, and deeply capable third-party partner like Limelight, the work needs to always be geared to maximising the potential of the owner or the partner.

MTI: 2024 will be known as the year Google backtracked their cookie deprecation plan. How has this plan triggered new innovations in the market?

James: Given how Google dictates much of what happens in the programmatic space, you might have expected an audible sigh of relief from a marketplace that was desperately seeking better guidance from them. 

But what we are seeing is a greater drive to self-determination and not being at the whim of Google or other market-controlling forces. It means being able to activate our own approach to unlocking the targeting requirement because cookies will be with us in some shape or form for some time to come. 

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MTI: How do you balance the results for better experiences for audiences through Limelight’s offerings? What sets your platform apart in the AdTech landscape? 

James: Limelight empowers partners to develop better experiences for their audiences. We also help them to build, curate and manage audiences that are relevant and results-orientated for their demand partners, and in doing that, we also support the publisher.

What sets us apart is the human element – we pride ourselves on the level of support and service we offer to our clients. Added to that, we do not offer an ad exchange and the elixir of supply and demand to our partners, because we don’t want to compete for the same dollar as them. Our goal is merely to support their ambitions with flexible, deeply capable technology, which makes us unique.

MTI: OpenAI and Google have announced new AI-powered AdTech features on their platforms. What are your predictions for the future of programmatic advertising in 2025?

James: There’s no reason to believe programmatic won’t continue to grow and flourish and retain its position as the largest and fastest-growing part of digital budgets, especially as it comes more into play in channels like CTV and DOOH. 

It will continue to refine what it can do, and we are already seeing that with a raft of audience targeting, curation and yield optimization tools in platforms like Limelight, that allow you to maintain a leading-edge proposition, without forgetting the need to robustly deliver at scale for success. So it’s a balance between being the fastest, most technical racing car on the track, and still doing the hard yards as well as, if not better than, anyone else. 

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MTI: Please mention an AdTech/MarTech expert you would like to recommend to be featured on our martech top voice series: (why did you choose the expert, please mention the reason)

James: Craig Mytton at Airtory. He is developing and distributing the best rich media and social media creative platform in the market.

Thank you so much, James for sharing your insights with our audience. We look forward to having you again with us.

For media inquiries, you can write to our MarTech Newsroom at news@intentamplify.com

About James Macdonald