You’ve built a new social network called Minivan, for soccer moms and dads. You’ve signed all the soccer moms on the eastern seaboard and they’re sharing content. Your user numbers are soaring, but you’re not making money. Some of your soccer moms are leveraging the platform for their businesses and want your help to reach new markets for their locally made sports gear. Unfortunately, making a full-featured advertising platform isn’t something your small engineering team can do overnight, especially not while you’re still trying to get funding yourself.
It’s not hard to create an individual advertising campaign nowadays. There is a large set of platforms and services where you can get started with your first ad. Facebook and Google AdWords are fantastic at getting first-time users to create their first ad on their platforms. But, as your business scales up and you want to run thousands of campaigns targeting segments of your customers, those platform tools slow you down, forcing you to make campaigns one by one.
Let’s go up a level. You’re an agency — you manage a variety of brands. Keeping all the campaigns in check, performing well, and keeping clients happy is a feat. You’ll need custom software to manage everything. Enter the Demand-Side Platform. DSP is a service that manages advertising campaigns. That’s what our programmatic advertising platform does. You probably knew that, arriving on our blog.
But let’s go up another level. MediaMath is designed to be API First. What does that mean? Everything in the platform is built on top of our API services. If you’re in our T1 platform and creating a campaign, that’s a series of API calls your browser makes to our services. The T1 platform is a shiny facade to the gritty advertising workshop inside.
Let me break that down with an analogy:
If you want to buy a chair, you go to a chair store, and pick one up. If you have custom needs, you can reach out to a chair factory who will custom build one for you. As of now, we’ve had lots of companies willing to customize the campaign to your needs. But what if you need more? What if you want the factory itself?
This is the idea behind MediaMath’s developer platform. The engineering team at Minivan, for instance, can build MediaMath’s DSP directly into Minivan’s system letting your users create their own campaigns to target their ideal audience. Now, instead of seeing car ads on your service, your customers are marketing to each other. Such ads can be distributed on the wider web as well.
APIs don’t just allow individual actions — they give users an ability to franchise their services, allowing deep integrations into new markets. This, at least, is one road that Minivan can take.
To learn more about MediaMath APIs, click here.