Pinterest Launches API to Attract Brands

With its new API, Pinterest is looking to pin the interest of some big business.

In a blog post yesterday (April 27), the virtual scrapbooking site announced the release of Marketing Developer Partners (MDP), a program through which select developers are given access to new application programming interfaces (APIs) that will optimize companies’ abilities to promote their brands on Pinterest.

The first of these APIs, called Content Publishing API, relates to the process of creating, scheduling and publishing Pins and boards to the site. The 10 partners currently allowed to use the Content Publishing API are Ahalogy, Buffer, Curalate, Expion, Newscred, Percolate, Shoutlet, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Tailwind.

Although Pinterest is keeping mum about what brands the above developers are linked with, Re/Code reports that names like Kraft and Procter & Gamble are among them. Developers such as those aforementioned curate companies’ presence across multiple online channels, saving their social media personnel from having to deal with a separate account for each one.

“Two-thirds of the content on Pinterest comes from brands and businesses,” Jyri Kidwell, Pinterest’s Head of Marketing Developer Partnerships, told Re/Code. “All that content makes for a richer experience for pinners [the term for consumers who use Pinterest].”

In the blog post announcing Marketing Developer Partners, Kidwell wrote that a second API — Ads API — is in beta in the U.S. The goal of that API, as described by Kidwell, “is to work with leading ad platforms to help advertisers optimize their campaigns and find sustained success on Pinterest.”

Essentially, as Re/Code explains, Ads API would generate advertorial pins for companies, called “promoted pins,” posted through third-party applications. As for who some of those third parties might be, Pinterest, again, isn’t sharing.

“We’ve carefully selected these 10 partners,” Kidwell told Re/Code. “Just like any other ecosystem, we’ll be auditing and monitoring the [spam] risk. We’re not an open program.”