In marketing tech at Netflix, APIs are the new black

Tony Ralph, the director of ad technology at Netflix, delivered one of the best talks at MarTech in San Francisco earlier this year. It’s truly a “graduate level” discussion about how Netflix’s adtech/martech team developed a build-and-buy strategy for their own technology stack for bringing programmatic advertising in-house.

While not every marketing team has access to the level of engineering talent that Netflix has, Tony makes a compelling case for businesses to internally develop customized marketing technology solutions.

“Why wouldn’t you want to [build]? You get exactly what you want. You get to prioritize those idiosyncratic features that only you need. You get to tailor it for your own workflow and your own business logic. And you can use all the first-party data and all the nuance you know about your business immediately and tailor your toolkit around that.”

But as Tony also explains, you certainly don’t have to build everything yourself. By choosing marketing technology vendors that provide full APIs, Netflix was able to leverage off-the-shelf technology and then integrate them into their own vision of the perfect marketing stack.

Here’s the video of his talk:

And here’s Tony’s accompanying slide deck from his presentation as well:

Interested in attending a conference that discusses marketing technology at this level? If you’re based in Europe, consider joining us at MarTech Europe in London, October 20-21.