• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, September 10, 2015

Social’s programmatic party keeps getting bigger and bigger. Things heated up years ago with the Facebook Exchange (FBX) and Twitter’s acquisition of mobile ad exchange MoPub, but now some of the “other” social platforms -- namely Instagram and Pinterest -- are giving advertisers programmatic access to their inventory.

The newest partner is marketing tech company Amobee, which on Thursday announced it has been granted access to Pinterest’s ads API and is now a Pinterest Marketing Developer Partner. Amobee joins companies such as 4C, Adaptly, Ampush, Kinetic, Unified and others as a Pinterest Marketing Developer Partner. The full list can be found here.

As a result of the integration, “advertisers can buy Pinterest programmatically through Amobee as a managed service,” explained Chad Bronstein, VP of global partnership at Amobee. He noted that while clients will be able to use their own data for targeting ads on Pinterest, Amobee will not have access to Pinterest’s data.

In any event, Amobee now boasts that it has programmatic access via APIs to three major social channels: Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. One would assume integration with Instagram is at least on the drawing board.

These new programmatic APIs that social sites are introducing are more akin to programmatic direct trading than real-time bidding (RTB). The APIs allow marketing partners to plug into the social sites and use data to target specific users, and they allow the social sites to maintain control over who has programmatic access to their inventory.

And these APIs are growing in popularity.

Instagram recently rolled out its advertising API program, and it has been active in adding partners. For example, the company recently announced that AdRoll -- one of the largest retargeting firms in the industry -- has plugged into its ads API, allowing AdRoll clients to programmatically target and retarget consumers on Instagram.

In a way, these APIs are growing social’s programmatic presence one partner at a time. They are also allowing some of the social sites sitting behind Facebook and Twitter to join the party.