Home Mobile Pinterest Snaps Up Mobile Retargeting Firm And Deep-Linking Outfit URX

Pinterest Snaps Up Mobile Retargeting Firm And Deep-Linking Outfit URX

SHARE:

PinterestURXPinterest’s rumored acqui-hire of deep-linking startup URX is a go.

On Tuesday, Pinterest announced that it’s bringing the San Francisco-based URX team into the fold, but not its technology. URX, which started as a deep linking provider before becoming a mobile retargeting platform, will work with its customers to sunset its advertising product.

As of July, URX had 42 employees. Today, URX has around 30 employees, roughly half of who will join Pinterest across its product management, engineering and partnership teams. URX had raised $15 million since it was founded in 2013.

John Milinovich, URX’s co-founder and now former CEO, will come on board at Pinterest as a product manager. Milinovich is also an ex-Googler who helped launch Google Offers, a Groupon-like daily deals service that Google shut down in 2014.

Milinovich and his crew from URX will work on “content-related products across the organization,” a Pinterest spokesperson said, including search and discovery and Pinterest’s rich pins product, which “[helps] people take action on the pins they discover.”

While Pinterest didn’t elaborate further, it bears noting that one of URX’s focuses was on improving app discovery, a process that is notoriously broken and is a market that Pinterest has only dipped its toe into. In February 2015, Pinterest rolled out App Pins, which lets people pin and download apps on their phone without having to leave the Pinterest experience.

The acqui-hire could also be an attempt to take a page out of Twitter’s playbook. Twitter acquired digital ad platform TellApart in August and recently started testing dynamic product ads that allow DR advertisers to target users off-platform with personalized ads based on browsing behavior.

TellApart is mainly a desktop player. URX is all about mobile. But as Milinovich told AdExchanger in February, “information is information no matter where it is.”

Although Pinterest has been making advertising-related overtures – it opened up its ads API in June – some advertisers, although interested in the platform’s potential, are a little lukewarm about the reality.

It “feels like they haven’t come through with a super-compelling product,” said Scott Symonds, managing director of media and data at AKQA. “It had its moment, and now it’s almost too late to get excited. You want a darling period where everyone spends, but then you want to come out with a product that works soon after to keep up the momentum.”

Perhaps this is a belated effort in that direction, a way for Pinterest to enhance its buy button with deep-linking tech. Although there’s been a lot of hype, social shopping hasn’t really taken off.

Subscribe

AdExchanger Daily

Get our editors’ roundup delivered to your inbox every weekday.

That said, Pinterest as a source of rich user intent is nothing to sniff at.

Facebook is arguably top of the funnel, while other players like Amazon or Yelp are way down at the bottom of the funnel. But Pinterest “activates the consumer in the middle to power portion of the funnel – when they may be particularly receptive to purchase and looking for ideas or inspiration,” noted Andrew Lipsman, VP of marketing and insights at comScore, in a recent report.

Bolstering that certainly seems like a major rationale behind the deal.

“We’re focused on building useful and relevant experiences to help people discover ideas and bring those ideas to life,” Pinterest’s head of product Jack Chou noted in a statement. “We can now accelerate our efforts with the URX team, who are leaders in mobile content understanding, recommendations, monetization and discovery.”

Must Read

Pacvue Enters The Next Chapter Of Retail Media With New CEO Rahul Choraria

Pacvue has promoted COO Rahul Choraria to chief executive.

Comic: What Else? (Google, Jedi Blue, Project Bernanke)

Project Cheat Sheet: A Rundown On All Of Google’s Secret Internal Projects, As Revealed By The DOJ

What do Hercule Poirot, Ben Bernanke, Star Wars and C.S. Lewis have in common? If you’re an ad tech nerd, you’ll know the answer immediately.

shopping cart

The Wonderful Brand Discusses Testing OOH And Online Snack Competition

Wonderful hadn’t done an out-of-home (OOH) marketing push in more than 15 years. That is, until a week ago, when it began a campaign across six major markets to promote its new no-shell pistachio packs.

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters
Google filed a motion to exclude the testimony of any government witnesses who aren’t economists or antitrust experts during the upcoming ad tech antitrust trial starting on September 9.

Google Is Fighting To Keep Ad Tech Execs Off the Stand In Its Upcoming Antitrust Trial

Google doesn’t want AppNexus founder Brian O’Kelley – you know, the godfather of programmatic – to testify during its ad tech antitrust trial starting on September 9.

How HUMAN Uncovered A Scam Serving 2.5 Billion Ads Per Day To Piracy Sites

Publishers trafficking in pirated movies, TV shows and games sold programmatic ads alongside this stolen content, while using domain cloaking to obscure the “cashout sites” where the ads actually ran.

In 2019, Google moved to a first-price auction and also ceded its last look advantage in AdX, in part because it had to. Most exchanges had already moved to first price.

Thanks To The DOJ, We Now Know What Google Really Thought About Header Bidding

Starting last week and into this week, hundreds of court-filed documents have been unsealed in the lead-up to the Google ad tech antitrust trial – and it’s a bonanza.