Report Reveals Incessant 'API' Updates Draining Marketer, Agency Resources

At a time when ad technology is requiring increasing resources from marketers and their ad agencies to stay on top of, a new report shows that some of the newest digital media platforms -- especially TikTok -- are also among the ones that update their marketing APIs (application protocol interface) most often.

With 51 updates since 2020, TikTok has had the greatest number of revisions to its marketing APIs of the major digital media and technology platforms used by Madison Avenue, according to technology development operations firm Rivery, which released the 2021 edition of its "Marketing API Benchmarks" report this morning.

Marketing APIs are the machine-to-machine interfaces that enable marketers and agencies' ad management and media-buying systems to share data and functionality in order to communicate seamlessly with each other, and when platforms update them, they often break and/or require additional internal technology resources to update their software.

advertisement

advertisement

"Marketing APIs are updated frequently, and these changes can break existing applications and workflows," explains Rivery Vice President of Marketing Ari Rosenstein, noting: "Every time a marketing API is updated, teams must manually update API connectors to account for the changes, or risk disruption to operations."

Rosenstein points out that five of the most popular platforms -- TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook Ads, Bing and Instagram -- in aggregate have updated their APIs 125 times this year.

"For marketing teams, and overworked developers, this rate is nearly impossible to keep up with," Rosenstein notes, adding: "This means more wasted time on manual work, and a broken marketing reporting process. That's why marketers are turning to data management platforms with pre-built, automatically updated API connectors."

Next story loading loading..