The mobile ad industry’s unspoken contract—deliver performance, don’t ask questions—is being quietly torn up. A growing push for transparency is reshaping the rules, making visibility just as important as results.

This tension isn’t new to Tomás Yacachury, Strategic Partnerships Lead at Kayzen, a mobile-first DSP for programmatic. He believes the industry is edging closer to a reckoning on transparency and control.

Add transparency: “It’s hard to argue against the value the big players bring, because they perform very well,” Yacachury says. “But at the same time, concerns are growing around transparency, control, and the risk of sharing your first-party data with platforms that have their own agendas.”

He notes such conversations weren't about discovery for Kayzen, but about validation. For a company built from the ground up as a self-serve DSP, transparency isn't a feature. It's a requirement. “It confirmed that our original focus on providing a platform with impression-level transparency and full control over your data was the right path all along.”

From report to robot: The push for clarity extends beyond metrics to the data itself. While AI is the industry’s biggest buzzword, Yacachury points to its most practical application: democratizing information. “For years, I authored our Programmatic Inventory Index, but there's only so much data you can fit into a single report,” he shares.

That gap prompted Kayzen to create a generative AI tool focused on helping advertisers access the kind of deep, proprietary data they previously couldn't reach. “People are used to interacting with ChatGPT. We wanted to provide a familiar tool that allows them to access proprietary data they can’t get anywhere else to better plan their campaigns.”