Pinterest Debuts Mobile-Only Promoted Video Ads

What Happened
Pinterest has joined the ongoing push for video ads among social media sites as it debuts its first video ad product, Promoted Video, on its mobile apps. Users will see the GIF-like Cinematic Pin ads as a teaser for the video ads, which users can tap on the Cinematic Pins to play in a new page that also displays a gallery of branded pins below the video. The Promoted Video ads run up to five minutes long and can be formatted horizontally or vertically. Pinterest says it has no plan to bring this video ad unit to desktop devices at the moment.

What Brands Need To Do
Leading social media companies have long been putting a lot of effort into building out their video products and vying for the ad dollars flowing into digital video. Facebook launched its auto-playing video ad in March 2014, and Twitter quickly followed suit with Promoted Video ads in August 2014. In this regard, Pinterest may seem a bit late to the party, but the way it incorporates the video ad into its existing mobile user experience should provide some add-on value for brand marketers looking to further engage Pinterest users and leave a lasting impression beyond Cinematic Pins.

 


Source: Marketing Land

Pinterest Switches To Auction-Based Ad Model

What Happened
Pinterest is moving away from fixed-price ads toward a more performance-based ad buying model as the social site continues its quest to appeal to advertisers. To kickstart the change, the company launched yesterday a new auction process for marketers to bid on its ad inventory, which it has tested with brands such as Home Depot, JCPenney, and General Mills. To ensure a good user experience, Pinterest is also adding the support for frequency capping so that consumers are not bombarded with the same highest-bidding ad.

What Brands Need To Do
As Pinterest transitions to an auction-based ad buying model, brand advertisers gain more flexibility and accountability for planning their campaigns on Pinterest. With the new ad buying model, brands can optimize their ad buying on Pinterest in accordance with their campaign goals. If your brand was hesitant about buying ads on Pinterest due to its fixed pricing, this move should come as a welcome change that may be worth exploring.

 


Source: AdWeek

Burberry Partners With Sephora For Buyable, Personalized Pinterest Board

What Happened
Burberry is venturing into social commerce as it teams up with cosmetics retailer Sephora and Pinterest to promote its new mascara line to beauty shoppers. The luxury brand is leveraging Pinterest’s API to create dynamic “beauty boards” that display personalized product suggestions and makeup tips based on the cosmetic preferences users indicate in a Burberry-sponsored questionnaire. The products featured on the beauty board are also buyable on Sephora’s website via clickthrough. To raise awareness for the campaign, Burberry is cross-promoting with Sephora on social media and bought “Promoted Pins” to reach more Pinterest users.

What Brands Need To Do
By offering beauty shoppers a personalized product discovery experience, Burberry is adding a hook to this social commerce campaign to reel in intrigued customers. Besides Burberry, fashion brands such as J.Crew and Madewell have started experimenting with flash sales on Instagram. As more and more brands experiment with selling directly to customers via social channels, brands can take a cue from Burberry’s approach and create personalized and interactive user experiences for their social commerce efforts.

 


Source: Glossy

Pinterest Adds Shopping Cart, Expands Visual Search And Buyable Pins

What Happened
Pinterest made a few announcements on Tuesday to boost its ecommerce features. To start with, the company unveiled a brand new “shopping cart” feature that follows users across devices and allows them to purchase multiple products from different merchants at once. The company also announced that Buyable Pins, which debuted on its mobile app last summer, are now coming to the web. The company is also extending the visual search feature that it has been testing to let users search for similar items shown within a post.

What Brands Need To Do
According to a recent study by Millward Brown, 83% of active Pinterest users have purchased a product because of something they saw on the site. As Pinterest continues to build out its ecommerce features, brands interested in social commerce, especially those whose target audiences overlap with Pinterest users, should take note and learn to leverage them to boost direct sales. For example, adding support for the “shopping cart” and experimenting with Buyable Pins would be a good place to start.

 


Source: AdWeek

Pinterest Releases Targeted Ads By Matching Emails And Device IDs

What Happened
Pinterest is taking a page out of Facebook’s playbook, officially rolling out an ad targeting tool similar to Facebook’s popular Custom Audiences product. With the new tool, advertisers on Pinterest can reach their existing audience by matching email addresses or mobile ad IDs from their CRM databases and further expand the reach of their ad buys via lookalike targeting. Pinterest has been testing this targeting option since March.

What Brands Need To Do
Pinterest has been ramping up its ad products, recently adding Millward Brown and Oracle Data Cloud as partners to offer brands advanced measurements. This new targeting tool can help brands, especially retailers with a substantial subscriber list, reach their desired audiences in a more granular way. For businesses with an overlap between their customers and Pinterest users, this should be worth a try.

 


Source: AdExchange

Facebook And Pinterest Partner With Analytics Firms To Track Offline Attribution

What Happened
In order to better measure how their ads impact offline sales and boost their ad attribution capabilities, Facebook and Pinterest announced new partnerships with Quantium and Oracle Data Cloud, respectively, earlier this week. For Facebook, the decision to team up with Quantium, an Australian data analytics and strategy firm, stems from their clients’ need to better understand the effectiveness of their ad spending on social media. Brands that have joined the beta test include L’Oreal, Kelloggs, and Proctor & Gamble.

As for Pinterest, the new partnership with Oracle Data Cloud aims to further convince brand advertisers of its conversion prowess. Citing the results of a new Oracle study, which “measured in-store sales for 26 Pinterest campaigns across major food and drink, household goods, and beauty brands,” the company says its Promoted Pins “drive five times more incremental in-store sales per impression” compared to other online advertising.

What Brands Need To Do
While measuring offline sales and store visits driven by online and mobile ads are still relatively new in ad attribution, they have quickly become crucial parts of digital ad measurement, especially for retailers and CPG brands. As social platforms like Facebook and Pinterest try to appeal to advertisers by beefing up their attribution tools, brands should learn to leverage the new data they generate to inform their current and future campaigns.


Sources: Mumbrella & Marketing Land

Real-Life Pinterest Pins Pop Up In A Brazilian Furniture Store

What Happened
Pinterest’s red “Pin It” button enables users to quickly save images or product pages from third-party sites to their collections. Now Tok&Stok, the biggest designer furniture store in Brazil, is bringing a physical version of those iconic pins into its store to add an interactive layer to its in-store experience. Working with a local agency named DM9DDB, Tok&Stok placed a number of Bluetooth-enabled Pins around its store, and when shoppers who install their “PinList” app see something they like, they can simply push the physical Pin to add the corresponding item to their digital collection. You can see how the Pins work in this demo video.

What Retailers Need To Do
This innovative retail installation offers an interesting case of reverse engineering as a brick-and-mortar retailer modeled the physical Pins based on how their digital counterpart works. It points to the new retail reality that most people shop with their phones, which retailers should take advantage of to devise new in-store experience, incorporating digital elements into their physical space to intrigue and engage with customers.

To learn more about what retailers can do to reach today’s connected shoppers with an integrated, omnichannel approach, check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 


Source: AdWeek

 

Pinterest Taps Millward Brown to Offer Brands Advanced Measurements

What Happened
Pinterest announced on Monday that it will soon provide its U.S. advertisers with advanced measurements to show how their Promoted Pin campaigns are performing beyond standard metrics such as number of impressions or re-pins. By working with market research firm Millward Brown Digital, Pinterest will start telling brands how their ad campaigns are doing in terms of lifting brand awareness, brand affinity, and even purchase intent.

In related news, the social scrapbooking service also announced that it is once again broadening its ad sales focus to cover brands in financial services, travel, and other verticals. The news came about 5 months after the company decided to narrow its ad efforts to only retailers and CPG brands last December.

Why Brands Should Care
According to a study by Millward Brown in partnership with Pinterest, 83% of active Pinterest users have purchased a product because of something they saw on the site. With the advanced measurements, brands advertising on Pinterest can now better understand which part of their campaign is driving conversion and brand lift to adjust their campaign efforts and use the insights to inform their future campaigns. The expanded ad sales focus should also come as good news for brands, as they can now receive some hands-on support from Pinterest’s ad team.

 


Source: AdAge & WSJ

JCPenney Sets Up Pinterest Boards In Malls To Target Moms

What Happened
JCPenney is looking to attract Pinterest-loving moms to malls with real-life Pinterest boards. The company plans to set up digital billboards in ten malls to showcase their products as well as beauty and hair inspirations as part of its Mother’s Day campaign. The retailer is working closely with Pinterest to leverage user insights from the social scrapbooking site to create the selection. Consumers will see the Pinterest boards in the general shopping area of the malls, and then shop for the looks they like at the JCPenney stores nearby.

What Retailers Need To Do
It makes sense for Pinterest to team up with JCPenney, which Pinterest reports it shares a similar target audience with. By bringing Pinterest boards into the physical world, the retailer is able to create an in-mall activation that engages shoppers and aids product discovery, while also fueling its Pinterest-loving customers with inspiring and helpful ideas. With an increasing number of shoppers now researching online before purchasing in stores, it is important for brick-and-mortar retailers to find compatible ecommerce and digital partners to help bridge the gap between online discovery and offline shopping.

 

Source: AdAge

Pinterest Expands Promoted Pins To Select International Markets

What Happened
Pinterest is ready to extend its ad products to some international markets as the social scrapbook network continues to seek higher ad revenues. Previously, Pinterest had limited the availability of its ad products to domestic advertisers only. Now, advertisers in U.K. are able to buy Promoted Pins to promote their content. Pinterest also plans to launch ad products in several English-speaking countries soon.

What Brands Need To Do
Of Pinterest’s over 100 million active users, more than 45 million of them reside outside the U.S. so it is crucial for the company to expand its ad products to overseas markets as it seeks further growth. For brands with an international presence, this expansion should be good news as they gain another valuable social channel to target their audiences with paid reach enabled by the ad products.

 


Source: Wall Street Journal