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Status Check

There is a lot of chatter these days about how publishers and advertisers are using TikTok and Instagram to reach new — and younger — audiences. While those two companies boast the largest audiences, they are not the only names in the game.

Pinterest is one of the online destinations that possesses a large, loyal audience that is being leveraged by companies to drive engagement, particularly with holiday shopping underway.

I spoke to Martha Welsh, Pinterest’s chief strategy officer, for an interview about what makes the social media platform different than its competitors, why it actually wants to work with digital publishers, and how it is using A.I. to help advertisers.

Below is the Q&A.

How does Pinterest's audience differ from other social media platforms, and how do you believe advertisers can leverage that for their benefit?

I heard you’ve recently been using Pinterest to decorate your new home office. Like you, more than half a billion people come to Pinterest each month to explore, curate and shop. In fact, more than 50% of Pinterest users come to our platform to shop, and they save 1.5 billion Pins per week. This means ads are truly great content on Pinterest and actually enhance the core user experience. When someone searches for “winter boots” on Pinterest, they see personalized ads alongside organic content so they can seamlessly shop. Curation at this scale doesn’t happen on any other platform, and advertisers are taking notice. We’ve seen deepened user engagement while delivering more performance for advertisers — in Q3, we doubled the clicks to advertisers year-over-year again for the fourth quarter in a row.

What particular trends are you seeing in media consumption on Pinterest during the holiday period? And how are brands leveraging Pinterest to drive traffic and engagement as people shop for gifts?

Because users come to Pinterest with intent, we have a deep understanding of their tastes and know what they’re shopping for days, weeks, even months before they buy. That’s why we see so much interest from brands about our annual trend forecast, Pinterest Predicts — and nearly 80% of our trend predictions have come true over the last five years. I’m already buying “Fisherman Aesthetic” pieces for 2025! Holiday is the most important retail period of the year, and users are coming to Pinterest to shop —there have been over one billion searches for “gifts” or “presents” over the years. We saw a real opportunity to make holiday shopping more beneficial for users and brands on Pinterest, so we worked with tastemakers like Vogue, Emma Chamberlain, and K-pop girl group TWICE on 1,000 unique gift guides. We also launched a suite of new tools like promotions and deal ad modules powered by machine learning to better help retailers highlight their holiday shopping discounts.

There is a lot of focus on influencers hawking items on TikTok and Instagram. What role do they play in the Pinterest ecosystem? And do you worry about influencers, who are driven by advertising sales, misleading audiences?

The short answer is no, we’re not worried. While creators play an important role in our ecosystem, we get shopping inspiration from a broad range of trusted publishers, merchants, brands and more. And because users come to Pinterest for an authentic experience, we’ve found what works best on Pinterest is content with personality — not personalities with content. Pinterest users simply don’t respond well to inauthentic content.

While some tech companies are leaning away from media, Pinterest is doing the opposite. Tell me about the thinking behind partnering with companies like Dotdash Meredith and Condé Nast.

As a visual platform for searching and shopping, publishers are important partners for our business and content ecosystem, and we want to help them leverage Pinterest as another source for traffic and revenue. On top of the partnerships you mentioned, we published editorial board drops with Rolling Stone and Billboard, giving a second life to their archives, and launched the Red Standard Program to reward top performing and engaged publishers on Pinterest. This all came to life with our collaboration with REAL SIMPLE, where we leveraged our unique strengths around shopping and commerce to launch the first-ever shoppable issue on Pinterest. Ultimately, everything we do is focused on bringing our users the best content and making it as easy and seamless as possible to go from inspiration to action — publishers are a key component in making this possible.

Which publishers are doing the best on Pinterest? And are there any media brands that you think should be on Pinterest that are not taking advantage of your user base?

Any brand that leverages Pinterest has a lot to gain from the unique strengths of our platform. Brands like Vogue and Apartment Therapy have combined our expertise in technology with their brand caché to unlock new fans and audiences, including Gen Z, which happens to be our largest and fastest-growing demographic. Brands have been targeting this younger audience for years, and 66% of weekly Gen Z users have said Pinterest is the first or one of the first services they use to shop or browse. So we’re continuing to play to our strengths — visual search and shopping — and meeting our users both online and offline, from activations at Coachella to partnerships with favorite brands like Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, and Pacsun.

How is Pinterest working to infuse A.I. into both its consumer-facing website and on the backend for advertisers?

A.I. has always been a core component of personalizing the Pinterest experience. Our systems use our unique first party signals to make more than 400 million predictions per second about content that may inspire our users. As our A.I. learns from these user signals, we see better shopping and significant performance wins for advertisers. We’ve launched the Pinterest Performance+ Suite to bring the best of Pinterest’s AI capabilities to advertisers and to help them more easily develop advertising that’s smarter, more efficient and powerful. Pinterest Performance+ campaigns decrease campaign creation time significantly, with 50% less inputs required. And advertisers are seeing more value in clicks and conversions — Prada tested Pinterest Performance+ and saw a 30% increase in their conversion results in the US.

What's the most worrisome trend in tech today?

There has been a lot of conversation about the impact of the internet on the mental health and wellbeing of young people — and rightly so. I’m lucky to be part of a company whose core mission is to build an inspirational space online for everyone. This is especially important for our younger users, and we’ve taken a number of industry-leading steps such as making the experience for users under 16 private only. And as our CEO Bill Ready has demonstrated by, for example, calling for effective age verification at the device level, Pinterest is continuing to lead the way in pushing the tech industry to prioritize the safety of children and teens online.