Pitch deck: How Pinterest is selling ads ahead of its IPO

By Kerry Flynn • March 22, 2019 •

Pinterest has been on a tear — and has been aggressively courting advertisers — as the company prepares to go public.

On March 21, Pinterest announced it hired Jeremy King, former CTO of Walmart, as its head of engineering. Meanwhile, Pinterest’s sales team has been aggressively pursuing new and old ad accounts. Several ad buyers told Digiday that Pinterest has approached them with a new focus on understanding purchase intent, improved tools and new formats like video. The platform also benefits from cheap CPMs thanks to less competition.

Jenny Lang, svp, managing partner integrated investments at UM, said her agency sees Pinterest as valuable for connecting with customers looking for inspiration in areas like recipes, home decor and weddings. “I think Pinterest is really good to get that engaged consumer,” Lang said.

Another buyer, who works in-house at a brand and requested anonymity, expressed skepticism for Pinterest’s ability to expand beyond the aforementioned verticals.

“As a marketer, I’m skeptical that this works and is right for anything other than adjacent to retail, weddings, DIY, financial lead-gen (money-savings hacks) or travel,” the buyer said.

Digiday received three recent pitch decks, two from a large global agency within a holding company and one from a top global brand.

The eight slides below are from a recent deck received by a global brand.

The pitch emphasizes Pinterest as a place to discover. For example, 41 million people search for travel ideas every month on Pinterest, according to the deck.

The third deck from a global agency is for one of their accounts with a male-dominated audience. Indeed, Pinterest has been trying to change the narrative that it’s only for women, and therefore, not just for ad buyers with female audiences.

“One of the knocks against Pinterest is it’s all women, weddings, so they have been saying [in pitches] we have ‘X’ type of man and ‘Y’ type of man,” said an executive at a global agency.

E.J. Freni, chief revenue officer at Brand Networks, told Digiday last week, “Pinterest is no longer seen as a platform that’s specific to females between 25 and 54 years old. There’s a breadth and depth of audience there that advertisers are starting to wake up to. It’s no longer a test-and-learn media buy for many of the advertisers we’re working with.”

In the deck, Pinterest doesn’t reveal how many men are on Pinterest, but it touts that the male audience is larger than that of Sports Illustrated or GQ.