At its annual advertiser summit this week, Pinterest presented a pin-worthy pitch to marketers — that the platform has grown its audience and improved advertising performance without sacrificing its feel-good vibe. The pre-recorded event featured a fitness theme with humorous video montages set at the “Pinterest Performance Center,” a fictional athletic facility for digital marketers. The hour-long event was replete with inspiring ‘80s music, retro styling and plenty of puns (the target audience pool, the consumer lifecycling studio, a gym with weights labeled “benchmarks”).
A small sampling: “Listen, I’ve been running marketing campaigns since before you bought your first keyword, but it ain’t the game it used to be,” declared the character Coach ROI (pronounced “Roy”) in the video. “The landscape is more competitive than ever; audiences are a moving target; and there’s never enough time on the clock. Then the end of the quarter is coming up and the pressure is on to hit those goals. Well, if you have come to build your brands, to sweat your campaigns, to keep your KPIs on the prize, then we’ll all be winners here.”
But beneath all the retro kitsch and comic relief, Pinterest had a powerful message to get across: Its platform is now a full-funnel advertising channel that doesn’t come with the negativity and high costs associated with many of its competitors.
“Part of the reason we have done this show is to make it clear that we perform and we’re ready to compete for your investments, because when it comes to your marketing budgets, we know you’ve got other choices,” said Andréa Mallard, Chief Marketing Officer of Pinterest at the event. “And I want to talk about those other choices: It’s bad for everyone that you can still count on a couple of fingers where most of the money in this industry goes. Economies thrive on competition, and right now our industry needs more challengers. It’s time our industry had a better choice, a better place to spend marketing dollars, because I believe marketing budgets aren’t just business conversations, they’re values conversations.
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“We do not need to trade our children’s emotional wellbeing for return on ad spend,” Mallard added. “Younger generations need social media as an industry to change, and it’s the people and companies that fund these platforms, advertisers like you, who wield a lot of power.”
A New Era of Full-Funnel Performance at Pinterest
Mallard and other executives at the event didn’t shy away from the fact that Pinterest’s advertising performance hasn’t always been up to snuff, but they presented ample evidence that the tides are turning. According to CEO Bill Ready, the platform now boasts more than 1 billion users worldwide, including 522 million monthly active users. The platform also has expanded to 30 new countries, including South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
“Two years ago [when Ready joined the company], we began a new era at Pinterest,” Ready said. “We’ve built a more engaging, shoppable platform by leaning into what makes us unique. And at the same time, we’ve turned Pinterest into a competitive performance player for our advertisers. People are rediscovering us,” and Ready pointed out, “there’s something else interesting happening too — Pinterest is aging down. More than 40% of our users are Gen Z; they are our largest, fastest-growing and most engaged audience.”
The result of this user growth, as well as significant investments in advertising products and measurement, is that Pinterest is now a “full-funnel advertising solution.”
“We’ve always had strength in helping advertisers with their upper-funnel objectives, but Pinterest is now a performance platform too,” said Ready. “Over the last two years, we’ve overhauled our suite of lower-funnel products and launched automated solutions to help brands get the most out of every ad impression, and brands are seeing the impact. On Pinterest, brands don’t have to choose between aiming for awareness or lower-funnel performance. Now they can have both.”
New AI and Automation Tools for Pinterest Advertisers
According to Ready, Pinterest has more than doubled outbound clicks to advertisers’ websites in the last two years, and ad impressions are up more than 30% year-over-year. Additionally, the automations and other tools Pinterest has introduced for advertisers have helped cut cost-per-click rates in half, he said.
Now the company is doubling down on that success with continued enhancements to its suite of advertising capabilities, most notably the global rollout of its Performance+ suite of lower-funnel ad products. Performance+ tools help advertisers optimize their targeting, manage budgets and decrease campaign creation time through the use of AI and automation.
The tools are similar to those other big players in the space have been rolling out — targeting recommendations, creative optimizations to boost performance, bidding automation, image background generation — essentially bringing Pinterest in line with its competitors from a capability perspective.
Pinterest’s Differentiators: High-Intent Audiences, Positivity
But while its ad tools may now be similar to those of other social platforms, what makes Pinterest different is the unique behavior and ethos of its platform. “No other platform helps you decide what you want like Pinterest,” explained Martha Welsh, Chief Strategy Officer at Pinterest. “People save, mull over and refine their ideas. That’s our superpower and why shopping feels so seamless here — decisions are made on Pinterest.”
And Pinterest has been steadily amping up its shopping capabilities to the point that now, “shopping is integrated into all major user experiences across Pinterest,” said Ready, adding another distinction: “When a user wants to buy, we’re giving them a seamless connection to your app or website with our lower-funnel tools. That way, you’re gaining a customer from Pinterest, not just a transaction.
“At the same time, we’re using great new AI techniques to deliver more relevant and engaging ads,” said Ready. “People come to Pinterest to discover brands and products, so we know that when we deliver on relevance, ads are great content.”
Underscoring all of this is Pinterest’s continued focus on remaining a “positive corner of the internet.”
“For all the momentum we’re seeing, here’s what matters most to me — I joined Pinterest for the opportunity to build a more positive business model for social media, one centered on emotional well-being rather than engagement via enragement,” said Ready. “That cause has only become more urgent with the growing youth mental health crisis around the world. At Pinterest, we’re making it easy for growing minds to make better decisions by offering a healthier alternative to social media and proving that you can provide real value to your audience without sacrificing their emotional well-being.”
“We’re working hard every day to build a more positive place online, but we know positivity alone isn’t enough — Pinterest has to perform too,” added Mallard. “After years of playing catch up, we are punching above our weight and gaining speed. A growing, high-value, high-intent audience; more shopability; new lower-funnel offerings; a competitive, automated solution in Performance+; and a positive platform where you can grow your business without compromising your values.”
