Over the years, technology has completely altered how we go about our daily lives. From how we interact with one another and consume news, to the way we communicate with businesses and buy their products. Product and service information is now readily available and consumers have more options for buying products and services whether it be online, from their mobile device or as the result of the timely delivery of a special offer. For these reasons, marketers must be increasingly savvy and use available technologies to deliver the right information to their audiences at the right time.
Technology has lured audiences into an 'on-demand' world, in which the web has made content, products and services available at the click of a button. There are loads of media channels out there that consumers are rapidly zigzagging between which makes them more difficult to target. Consumers are also actively seeking to avoid traditional ad formats, they can skip TV ads if they chose and activate web browser ad blockers to remove banners from their screen – all making them more difficult to reach.
Today's often technology-wise consumer expects more. The problem for a marketer? Battling with the thousands, maybe millions, of companies competing in the world that are exposing us to an average of 3,500 marketing messages every day. Facebook, for example, has more than one million business advertising on its platform, so just how do you do cut through the noise? By being creative, inventive and looking at the tools you have at your disposal and figuring out how you can best use these to communicate with your audience.
Understanding the world of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is one way for agencies to stand out from the crowd whilst creating a unique experience for customers. Think of an API as a plug. A simple and fast way to plug in and consume a service from a third-party provider. Those services could be anything from content such as news, through to transactional services like sending an email, making payments or placing a phone call. What's unique about APIs is now you can consume these services through simple web interfaces that your software development team can integrate in a matter of hours. Gone are the days of drawn out commercial negotiations, the purchase and maintenance of third-party software and hardware, and time consuming, expensive bespoke integrations. For these reasons APIs truly are a game changer.
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APIs power many of the channels marketers interact with day in, day out, such as Twitter and Facebook, and enable the simple, straightforward and fast development of awesome tools that help us market our companies more creatively, which will ultimately drive revenues. Facebook's APIs have created a developer ecosystem that has built more than nine million apps on Facebook's platform, and those APIs power everything from using Facebook to take payments, through to adding 'Like' and 'Share' buttons to your own website content. The rapid rise in the availability of Netflix on a myriad of devices from mobile phones, to tablets, to Smart TVs has been down to the API it provides to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Netflix reports it receives over two billion calls per day to its API, and it alone now accounts for 33% of the USA's peak internet traffic. This kind of speed to market and scale of proliferation was impossible before APIs.
Once you put this kind of power in the hands of creative people, new possibilities are unlocked, and at Twilio, we're constantly blown away by the ideas they come up. A great example of this is when EE briefed London Agency, Poke, to create an outdoor campaign that would bring the community together at Christmas. Poke used an API to create something truly magical – Make Hackney Sparkle. By simply calling a number displayed on an EE outdoor advert, members of the public could make it snow on London's Rivington Street. The project really demonstrated just how to grab people's attention in among all that white noise I mentioned above. Even more powerful was there was no need for complex app downloads and installs – just a simple phone call supported out of the box by every phone on the planet. The campaign reached over 318,000 people on Facebook and Twitter and more than 10,000 people have watched the 'making of' video of the project.
This is just an example of the amazing and creative things we see being built using APIs every day. The beauty of an API is that pretty much any kind of implementation is possible. The API is the ingredient, and the recipe is only constrained by the imagination of the developer. For further background reading on the business context of APIs I would point you to Sam Ramji's seminal API presentations. It would be great to hear how you're using APIs to reinvent your business or improve the projects you are working on for your clients.
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