Pinterest is an odd duck in the social media category.
It’s not the first platform that comes to mind when one thinks of “performance advertising” and yet it’s doubling down on ads at a time when everyone else seems to be all-in on new revenue streams, like subscriptions or payment processing.
Bill Watkins, a 9-year Pinterest veteran in sales who was named CRO this year, says the company is focusing on three main pillars: its creator ecosystem, facilitating shopping and ad-based monetization.
“Specifically, I think a lot about advertiser diversification,” he said.
AdExchanger spoke with Watkins about Pinterest’s growth plans and priorities for the rest of this year.
AdExchanger: What does “advertiser diversification” mean for you?
BILL WATKINS: We’ve done a good job of diversifying the volume of advertisers overall across verticals and new geos, including our launch in Japan in March.
But what my team is really focused on is how we work with our partners, big and small, and the products and tools that we have to help them grow their business.
We’ve talked about our strength in retail and CPG for a long time, but we also partner with financial services, auto, equipment manufacturers and advertisers across other industries.
People are not on Pinterest looking for auto quotes, but we do know when our users are getting married, having a baby or buying a home. These big moments can be a trigger for financial services firms, mortgage and loans, retail banking and so forth.
What are you doing for creators on Pinterest?
We’ve invested a lot in this space.
We have new native publishing tools for creators and we launched a creator rewards program as an incentive. We’ve also launched partnerships, including with Tastemade to create an original series for us. We now have a Watch tab, which is like Pinterest TV.
And we’ve launched new formats, such as Idea Pins, which is our version of Stories. We’ve seen a 17x increase year-over-year in the amount of content posted in this format.
And we’ve released ad units and ad programs to assist with monetization efforts, like Idea Ads, which are sponsored versions of Idea Pins, plus paid partnerships to tap into Pinterest creators and connect them with brands. We’re seeing a roughly 60% lift in awareness and recall with those tactics.
Creators on Pinterest are a bit different than other platforms when you think about the quality of content, the tone and the tenor.
How so?
The positivity and the focus on inspiration.
I’ll give you an example. When creators come onto the platform, they adhere to a set of policies, our Creator Code. We set the bar a bit higher. This is not a place for toxic content. We explicitly banned body-shaming content and related ads on the platform, and saw a 20% to 25% decrease in those types of queries.
Our creators create content with personality, as opposed to being personalities that happen to create content. That’s how I would make a distinction between what you can expect to see on Pinterest versus other platforms.
To what degree are you monetizing off-platform audiences?
We’re focused on monetizing the impressions, clicks and conversions on our platform. But we also want to be really easy to work with, like if customers have audience lists to onboard.
We also have a lot of third-party measurement relationships to make it easier for folks to see the return on their investment across the entire advertising funnel.
My challenge to the industry is to think about expanding their attribution windows and taking a holistic view with first and third-party sources. That’s how I think about measurement and measurement partners.
How does that work when data and privacy rules reduce attribution windows and limit the conversion data advertisers are allowed to see?
I think about it in two ways.
The first is what we’re building. Our goal is for every Pin to be shoppable on the platform. We’ve rolled out new features like our Shopping API, Conversion API and mobile deep-linking and we recently acquired The Yes, which brings seamless checkout functionality. This is all part of an effort to increase the shoppability of our platform.
Secondly, as it pertains to attribution, we’ve been trained to simply take a product catalog, post it online and rush to the point of conversion – but that’s only a fraction of the true shopping experience.
When you look at the stats relative to investing in the full experience, basket sizes are higher and incrementality is better when you take into account the full online experience rather than just looking at the last click.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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