What you need to know in advertising today

Following its strong fourth quarter, Snap is making its Marketing API available to any ad agency, brand or ad tech company that wants to access the platform. The program, which was first launched in 2016, has been closed with limited access to a few companies until now.

The move essentially allows any company - irrespective of its size, scope or the scale of the software it is building - to leverage the Snap API to automate its ad efforts or build and sell tools for advertisers to use.

It also allows Snapchat to cater to an even broader base of marketers as well as prompt a wider variety of ads than the ones that currently exist on the platform.

To read more about how Snap is making its most aggressive bid for digital ad dollars yet, click here.

In other news:

Snap's VP of sales, Jeff Lucas, is leaving the company after less than two years. The exit comes a few weeks after Snap's VP of product announced his departure from the company.

A digital ad veteran is leaving the Washington Post hoping to use blockchain technology to save the media industry. The publisher's ad tech guru Jarrod Dicker has been named CEO of a blockchain tech company built for the media and ad industries.

The guys who helped build Jay-Z's streaming service Tidal are raising money to follow your every move. Thomas Walle and Kjartan Slette, have raised $17.5 million to expand Unacast, which supplies data from hundreds of mobile apps to ad targeting companies.

The CEO of digital advertising's biggest trade group says most big marketers are screwed unless they completely change their business models. Small and mid-sized brands, driven by data and digital marketing, are throttling growth for nearly every major consumer category, according to Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Rupert Murdoch reportedly threatened to publicly condemn Facebook back in 2016 if it didn't do a better job of compensating publishers. He confronted CEO Mark Zuckerberg in front of witnesses in 2016, demanding Facebook adjust its business model to be a better partner to the publishing industry.

The CEO of YouTube took a shot at Facebook: 'They should get back to baby pictures.' Susan Wojcicki was dismissive of Facebook's video ambitions during Recode's Code Media conference.

Google has unveiled new technology that lets publishers create mobile-friendly visual stories similar to the ones found on Snapchat and Instagram, the Wall Street Journal reports. AMP stories will feature vertical, swipeable slides of text, photos, graphics and video optimized for the mobile web.

CNN is bracing for layoffs in its digital group in a bid to target savings, Vanity Fair reports. CNN could eliminate as many as 50 jobs around the world this week.

Wired takes a behind-the-scenes look at Facebook. The story is littered with accounts of internal unrest within the company over the past two years and the social network's reckoning with its responsibilities as a publisher, as well as a platform.

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