Pinterest to Focus on Promoted Pins to Put Revenue in the Picture

Pinterest built its popularity on the power of the visual experience. Now the image-sharing site is looking to profit from that experience with the launch of Promoted Pins. Pinterest had hinted about Promoted Pins late last year, but now the site is ready to roll out campaigns from more than a dozen major brands, such as Kraft, General Mills, Gap, Expedia, and ABC Family. And Pinterest plans to pitch its Promoted Pins to the advertising community by making a grand display at Cannes this year. Adage.com reported how Pinterest’s big brand plans have marketers on pins and needles.

Pinterest is banking on the appeal of its unique user base to attract advertisers and finally position the platform for profitability. Pinterest quickly gained enormous popularity and tremendous traffic, but the site has been much slower in its pursuit of a monetization plan. With their official move into Promoted Pins, the company appears to be putting a plan into action and working to reel in revenue.

Pinterest is taking a consultative approach to ad sales by working closely with brands to help them better understand Pinterest users. This includes steering brands toward the type of creative that would resonate with pinners and help them connect with the community.

And the Pinterest community is an advertiser’s dream. According to eMarketer, Pinterest has 40.1 million monthly users in the U.S. alone and 85% of them are female. While Facebook and Twitter may have larger user bases, the unique makeup and mindset of Pinterest users is incredibly appealing to advertisers. After all, Pinterest users tend to be women who are actively searching and shopping for items to buy.

Kraft, one of the few brands participating in Promoted Pins, has expressed how Pinterest is perfect for their target market of 25- to 54-year-old women, especially women under the age of 34 who can be difficult to reach. As a result, Kraft’s Promoted Pins will be designed to appeal to those women by sharing recipes that incorporate the brand’s products and feature cooking content from their recipe website.

The Promoted Pins will appear in Pinterest searches and category feeds for related topics. They can be targeted by keyword, category, city, gender, and the type of digital device used to access Pinterest. Yet to maintain a clear distinction between ads and content, they will not show up in a user’s home feed or within their personal pin boards.

For now, Pinterest is just testing these Promoted Pins to see whether they appeal to users. The company is striving to develop high-quality Promoted Pins, which is why they have limited the program to a few select brands. If successful, the company is pinning its hopes on a self-serve ad product that would make ads available to advertisers of all sizes and make Pinterest the picture of profitability.

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