Here’s how Pinterest is pitching advertisers

The pitch, for a pet-food brand, offers almost everything Pinterest has been working toward the past year (some say too slowly.) Here’s a look at the key slides:

It’s pinning cats and dogs
Pinterest has more than 100 million users, this slide shows that many of them, 21.8 million pinners, are talking about pets. Women over 35 with household incomes above $100,000, are 36 percent more likely to be on the platform than other social channels. And dogs are more popular than cats it seems, with 359 million dog-related pins versus 320 million cat pins.

Social? No, thanks
In this slide, Pinterest shows how it sits somewhere between social media and search, with a little dig at social, where it claims Facebook users are not on the social network to shop. On Pinterest, they’re “open to new ideas.” This has become a familiar theme from Pinterest as it tries to show the value of the platform, where people “pin” digital items they come across online. The popular themes on Pinterest include fashion, home design, fitness, travel and other topics. Most of the content that is posted to Pinterest, 75 percent, features a brand mention.

Cinematic couponing
This is a new offering, according to the pitch. Pinterest can incorporate a link to digital coupons, if the brand has a third-party couponing service like Ibotta. The coupon promotion could be served in one of Pinterest’s newest ad formats, Cinematic Pins, which are GIF-like pins that move as the user scrolls up and down, but stop when the user stops. “Drive trial and purchase by using these innovative units as a way to reveal coupons,” Pinterest says.

“I love it. This is an attempt to really drive people to retail. Most marketers know that’s where a lot of the real dollars are,” Tuff said. “And on the back end, you can see how many retail sales coupons are driving, which proves the value of Pinterest.”

Targeting behavior
Pinterest has gotten better at understanding its audience — it can tell their interests based on pinning activity. Advertisers are able to target based on behavior or the context of the pages people visit, as well as more general attributes like gender. Behavioral targeting is the most specific for the individual user, as specific as “parents to be” and “brides and grooms to be.” It also has categories of behaviors from artsy to outdoorsy to travel pinners.

It pays to pay
This Pinterest chart shows the benefits of putting paid media behind a marketing campaign on the site. In fact, it shows that simply posting freely with an organic marketing strategy won’t get you too far. The organic pin strategy in the chart shows that over the course of a year, with 2,800 posts, the marketer reached 1.2 million people. With promoted pins, the marketer posted 80 of them and reached 10 million people. That’s 10 times the reach at 1/15 the content creation effort.

“Brands who create a robust organic presence for themselves across their official Pin Board become ‘discoverable’ and offer a variety of content which can be ‘re-pinned’ by followers, driving significant earned media,” said Sean O’Neal, president of Adaptly, a marketing technology platform that works with Pinterest. “But the most effective way to extend the reach of those pins is to boost them with paid media.”