What brands can gain from Snapchat opening up its API to all

Over the past year we have been undergoing a major push towards a programmatic business, says Snap. As Evan Spiegel said in the first annual earnings call last week: “Our advertising business changed profoundly over the past year as we migrated the sale of our Snap Ads to an automated auction. Over 90 percent of Snap ads were bought programmatically during Q4, which means that the auction transition for Snap ads is largely behind us.”

Launched in October 2016, Snap’s Marketing API has been only available to a few technology companies in the Snapchat Partners program.

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Now, Snapchat has now opened up its Marketing API to any developer, big or small, who’d like to access the platform. Any agency, brand, or tech partner can integrate their software regardless of its size, scope, or scale.

This means that advertisers can now layer on proprietary data sets to enhance targeting, creative, and measurement; e-commerce brands can optimize products according to popularity and inventory and insert ad metadata and performance metrics into their own data sets.