Pinterest has undergone a significant transformation in the last year.
The visual discovery platform has begun to drive more shopping on its service, more than two years after CEO Bill Ready took the reins. In Q4, Pinterest crossed the $1 billion mark in quarterly revenue for the first time. It also reported that clicks to advertisers grew 90% YoY for the most recent quarter.
The secret sauce seems to be its one-click-out strategy for all of Pinterest’s ad products, Carrie Sweeney, the platform’s VP of retail partnerships, told Retail Brew in January at CES: “We took away the close-up last year, where you would click on an image, it would pop up bigger, and then youʼd have to click again to get out.”
Now, itʼs one outbound click for everything that has any type of commercial intent on Pinterest. “The pinners have said, ‘We donʼt want a close up. We want to get to the stuff,’” Sweeney said. She added the zoom-in feature was starting to add friction to the commerce experience. In a sit-down chat on the sidelines of CES, Sweeney talked about what’s next for Pinterest.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What kinds of discussions does Pinterest have with retailers?
I think the conversations are: How can we help retailers drive conversions, drive sales? We had a pretty remarkable, I would say exceeding-all-expectations year last year in terms of pretty dramatically changing our strategy.
We wanted to make it a lot easier to go from that spark of inspiration to actually acting on what you see in the beautiful images on Pinterest. Thatʼs been the No. 1 request from Pinterest for years, and we really built out the technical pipeline, the ad formats, [and] organic experiences to do that.
This year, the ad road map has never been more robust. Product market fit has never been better. Youʼll see everything from more video formats, more GenAI formats with our Performance+ [ad tools] to make it easier to advertise local inventory ads, just more granularity to drive specific goals.
You spoke about livestreaming not working on Pinterest in an earlier panel. What lessons did Pinterest learn from that experience?
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It was called Pinterest TV. We had amazing in-house talent. We worked with influencers…There was certainly a lot of interest from all parts of the ecosystem, but it just wasnʼt scalable. We were getting a lot of viewers compared to other platforms for livestreaming and even a lot of conversions, but it was nothing compared to what we could drive in terms of conversions from more typical shopping formats.
Both clients and internally, it was just kind of this alignment to say, “This is interesting. Weʼre going to keep tabs on it, but itʼs not a game changer right now.” Itʼs not a groundswell, like weʼre onto something…We werenʼt getting to a certain threshold of viewers. We were seeing nice little increases, but it wasn’t 10%, 20%, 30% of the platform watching.
What is Pinterest’s shoppable video strategy going forward?
Everyone equates livestreaming with video, whereas I think itʼs one small, small piece of the ecosystem. Our overarching vision is to say, when you see a beautiful lifestyle image—static or video—on Pinterest…letʼs help people deconstruct that more seamlessly.
If youʼre in this aspirational upper-funnel mindset, you donʼt want to just see a blue couch on a white background. You want to see the whole room…Then you start getting the vibe from the room…Then you start seeing, “That’s what I want to create. That’s the couch I want.”
You just need the tools in our grid and our feed where people can easily go from big lifestyle video and image down to specific products and then back.
What kind of retailers is Pinterest interested in working with?
Weʼre always saying we will always give incredibly white-glove service, special hands-on attention to Walmart, Target, Amazon. But what about those smaller retailers, especially the ones powered by Shopify, which are digital-first and just doing really well? How do we make sure weʼre fully connecting them to the Pinterest suite of solutions? So, I think youʼll see from us this year an increasing look at some of the smaller, really sophisticated e-commerce parties, making sure we work with them closely.