Today’s developers face mounting challenges: heavier workloads, complex tech stacks and an increasingly fragmented advertising landscape demanding automation at scale. This complexity limits their ability to adopt new products and innovate.
At the same time, their role is expanding beyond technical implementation. They are becoming a critical link between marketing, operations, product development, creative and business strategy. As the advertising industry becomes more API-driven, this evolving developer expertise and collaboration are central to business success.
In its 2024 State of the API report, API collaboration platform Postman states that 74% of developers surveyed are now fully API first, rather than code first, representing an 11% increase from 2023.
The results speak for themselves: 63% of respondents can now produce an API within one week (up 47% from the previous year), enabling faster time-to-market for new features, automated regulatory adherence and quick recovery from API failures – typically under an hour.
So that’s all good, right? Well, not so fast.
The hidden costs of API sprawl
By putting APIs front and center, we may have enabled too much of a good thing and created new challenges to solve existing ones, particularly for developers.
Constant API updates and deprecations drain development resources, while inconsistent data formats and version differences across APIs complicate integration and reporting. Multiple API endpoints increase testing and monitoring and may require a complex coordination tax to solve simple business needs.
These technical challenges create bottlenecks that divert developer time away from innovation and product advancement.
Simplifying the API experience
To deal with API integration challenges and fragmentation faced by developers, ad tech companies are responding in various ways. One approach is through unified, domain-driven APIs built on a common model. Rather than having separate APIs for each product, these APIs are organized around core business concepts and operations, enabling consistent campaign management across multiple advertising solutions.
In older systems, developers often had to work with product-specific APIs, each with unique terminology and documentation. They would also have to update schedules, creating integration burdens and slowing down implementation. With newer unified models, developers can work within a single API framework that spans multiple ad products, minimizing version differences, simplifying updates and reducing development overhead.
The result: Developers can integrate, update and scale faster, unlocking tangible resource savings and freeing up time to focus on building better tools and customer experiences.
From bottleneck to benefit
In an ever-changing ad tech landscape, the ability to free up developer resources to innovate products and services is not only a luxury; it’s a strategic business differentiation.
Companies that prioritize developer experience can gain several competitive advantages, such as faster adoption of new ad products, higher customer satisfaction and retention, increased ability to attract partnerships and faster time-to-market for new features.
Companies that do not prioritize the developer experience risk losing market share to more developer-friendly competitors. As the advertising industry becomes increasingly API-driven, a superior developer experience – through unified, domain-driven APIs and streamlined integrations – has emerged as a critical battleground.
Amazon Ads, for example, is rolling out a reimagined API framework designed to simplify integration across our advertising solutions. The first Amazon Ads API to launch with this new model is our campaign management API, with additional APIs in the process of being purpose-built to work across all products.
These frameworks will create a consistent API architecture that reduces version differences and mitigates integration complexity.
In other words, developers will be able to do more in less time, freeing them up to reinvest their brain power in innovating for customers.
Those who lead in this area will be better positioned to scale, innovate and deliver greater value to their customers in an increasingly technical landscape.
