YouTube - Third Party Ads API for Creating Ads?
Does YouTube offer an API for third party platforms for ad creation and execution? I know YouTube has an ads reporting API available through Google Ad Words but I'm trying to find if we can build an ad serving API. I searched here and found someone said no but I can find little info on why or where they got this info. The use case is for clients to create and launch YouTube ads from a third party platform via an API connection.
As far as Google Ads is concerned, you cannot build or mutate any video campaigns over an API. This has been an ongoing feature request for about as long as video campaigns first were introduced, but is still not available. See the latest answer on one of many corresponding threads in the Ads API forum.
Of course, you can also buy YouTube inventory over DV360. The current APIs (namely the obsolete BidManager API and the newer DV360 API) currently do not support the creation of TrueView line items, but there is write functionality in closed beta that should eventuelly support this use case. I'm not aware of any timeline for general availability, though.