Tag: api

Snapchat’s Ad API Open For Programmatic Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Snapchat has officially opened its advertising API to third-party partners for programmatic ad sales. Brands including McDonald’s, Unilever, Nissan, and Gatorade are among the first to try out programmatic buying on Snapchat. Its API also includes targeting via email matching, performance visualization tools for real-time tracking, and the ability to do A/B testing for in-app campaigns.

What Brands Need To Do
According to eMarketer, Snapchat is expected to expand its user base by 27.2% this year, surpassing its rivals such as Twitter and Pinterest. Now with the added support for programmatic buying, Snapchat took another big step in improving its ad products to match its rapid growth. Brands need to consider getting on Snapchat to reach its young-skewing users via not only standard video ads, but also more unconventional ad units such as custom Geofilters and branded selfie lenses.

 

Source: AdAge

Why Walgreens Released Two New APIs

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pharmacy chain Walgreens is extending its developer efforts with two new APIs, making it easier for third-party apps to pull out information about their stores across the country and access their digital coupons. Walgreens launched its API program in 2012, allowing developers to send print requests to its in-store photo kiosks. Since then, the company has expanded this program to allow fitness app developers to access its Balance Rewards loyalty program and an API for apps that handle prescription refills and transfers.

What Brands Need To Do
Walgreens’ API program provides a great example for brands and retailers to make their information and services readily available for app developers. Previously, for instance, Walgreens would send an Excel or CSV file to developers who requested access to its store locations, which is an ineffective way to share such information. By releasing those APIs, not only is Walgreens building some goodwill among the developer community, it is also leveraging third-party apps to reach more customers. Therefore, more brands should take a cue from Walgreens and start releasing their own APIs.

For more information on how brands, especially retailers, can effectively reach consumers across platforms by taking an omnichannel, data-driven approach, check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Amazon Brings Its Mobile Ad API To iOS

Posted on by Lab Team

Amazon is bringing its Amazon Mobile Ads API to apps on iOS, allowing app developers to place ads from the Amazon Mobile Ad Network in apps across platforms. Previously only available on Android and Fire OS devices, the ad platform now can help better monetize iOS apps and gain access to highly relevant ads Amazon and its subsidiaries. If this works as well as Amazon’s “recommendation list”, it could potentially work wonders on iOS.

Pinterest Launches API; Announces New Partners

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At long last, Pinterest is launching an API that will allow pins to be embeddable across the web. The first partners for the API have already been announced, and include a host of big names: Zappos, Walmart, Disney, Nestle, Random House, and Hearst. It means that Pinterest will try to ramp up its traffic referral data – it’s current second after Facebook in that category – while making itself more useful to sites and brands to post pins and other social details across different networks. It also means more marketing to spend against these strong links between sites. It’s an important more, one that will likely see Pinterests’ already high relevancy only increase. 

API-enabled ads pack more punch

Posted on by Lab Team

The history of storytelling is as much about technology as it is about narrative. As humans have transitioned from the earliest cave scratches to the newest highly interactive digital experiences, the way stories are told have had a powerful influence on the stories themselves. As the number of media channels continue to blossom, marketers must not only become more familiar with existing tools, but stay relevant by seeking out competitive new platforms.

The IPG Media Lab‘s most recent Media Trial focused on one important new element of storytelling: data. Data sets are increasingly being structured and exposed via APIs so that third parties can grab and understand the data in real time. Weather, headlines, traffic, sports scores, tweets, videos, social data—the available data sets are only limited by your imagination. Marketers who can curate these streams in real time may be able to create more engaging and more impactful stories, with the results to match.

Continue reading “API-enabled ads pack more punch”

Data is the new black….cyan, magenta, and yellow

Posted on by Lab Team

Historically, ads have been closed systems. The information contained in the ad itself is fixed. Most of the interactivity in digital ads to date has been limited to the ability to link somewhere or to engage with content elements that were included in the unit at the time it was trafficked. But anyone who has ever looked at billboard that had a clock or thermometer knows the power of real time information to capture attention.
There is a new generation of rich media providers who now enable advertisers to pipe up-to-the-moment content into digital display ads. The number of data sources available by API is growing every day – weather, traffic conditions, UV index, Tweets, Facebook updates, you name it! The next generation rich media companies are working hard to make it easy for advertisers to incorporate these feeds while assuring the ads never break.
Continue reading “Data is the new black….cyan, magenta, and yellow”

API driven creativity

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There is a new school of advertising creativity that paints with data and sculpts with APIs. Storytellers are learning to apply dynamic personalized data to enhance the narrative itself, not just provide adjacent functionality. API stands for application programming interface. Essentially APIs allow data streams to be shared with external entities. Data is bundled in a way so that that a developer can design a new application that incorporates that information and functionality.

The trick with building an application that relies on someone else’s API is that if the other guy changes the way their API works it can break your application. Facebook app builders have long struggled to stay aligned with how Facebook shares data. For API-enabled digital ads, companies are emerging that can add the layer of functionality and monitor for any changes to the underlying APIs. Examples of ad networks that offer this type of “rich media” are SpongeCell, ClickTurn, and SocialMedia.com.

In an ever more fragmented media world, it is getting harder and harder to deploy a relevant piece of creative to niche audiences. Data feeds are one way to produce a personalized experience without having to actually construct a vast portfolio of creative. Continue reading “API driven creativity”

Why Twitter has not jumped the shark

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Has Twitter jumped the shark? (iStock)If I had a nickel for everytime someone asked me What is hot right now? I’d be twittering off my yacht in the Côte d’Azur.

In a recent meeting with some of my fellow digerati we were pitching ideas to get a client excited about  what new’s in the media landscape and all of them declared, Twitter is dead…it’s over. But I think there’s plenty of life left in our friend Twitter.

We are at an interesting crossroads with Twitter, Facebook and a lot of other overly hyped platforms. In many cases, it’s not about the solution itself but about how people are leveraging the data and behavior surrounding that platform and hence, their API’s (application programming interfaces – see my recent article on using APIs for content delivery). Continue reading “Why Twitter has not jumped the shark”