Pinterest recently made a few cryptic announcements that are setting the stage for its full-fledged advertising platform for brands.
Pinterest, in the form of Promoted Pins, has been testing branded content on its network for a while now, and it has also introduced in-depth analytics for brands to monitor the performance of their Pins. In a recent blog post, Pinterest’s head of strategic partnerships Julie Park indicated that brands can expect a more refined version of Promoted Pins, with better targeting and analytics options, to be rolled out soon.
Park writes:
1. We want to help advertisers better understand how their Promoted Pins are doing. For example, an advertiser may want to know how often their ads are showing on Pinterest or how many people bought a product after clicking on a Promoted Pin. In the future, we’ll report that info to them.
2. We also want the Promoted Pins you see to be relevant to you and come from brands you’ve shown interest in. We hope to incorporate information advertisers share with us so that we can show you Promoted Pins that don’t feel random or distracting.
In other words, Pinterest is adopting the Instagram advertising model, where the brand works closely with a handful of advertisers to create highly visual, engaging content that would be native to the platform, also providing them in-depth analytics on how that content is performing.
Also like Instagram, Pinterest has been slow to embrace advertising, for fear of upsetting their loyal users. However, Pinterest probably has less to worry about in terms of nnoying customers since it is already such a consumer-product driven website. Probably no other social network is as directly suited to commerce and feeding consumer buying, as Pinterest, and it makes sense for it to start monetizing that trait.
However, brands will have to wait until Oct 19, which is when Pinterest will add new updates to its Privacy Policy and consequently explain the new capabilities of its advertising tools.
