By Krystal Scanlon • March 6, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
Pinterest is gearing up for a big 2025, doubling down on visual search, expanding its global footprint and rolling out more performance-driven tools to woo long-tail advertisers.
Visual search has always been core to Pinterest’s DNA, so it’s no shock that it’s a top priority, especially as the platform tries harder to stand out from the competition.
In conversation with Digiday, Matt Crystal, Pinterest’s vp of performance, said that the team would have “a lot to share later this year,” though didn’t provide any specifics. However, he did suggest that these announcements will be “uniquely Pinterest and no one else can really do it in the way we can,” and will “open up a tremendous amount of opportunity for our advertisers.”
In other words, watch this space.
Crystal was far more direct about Pinterest’s expansion plans. The platform intends to focus much harder on growing ad revenue beyond its core markets of the U.S. and Canada, which raked in $2.88 billion in combined revenue in the most recent quarter, compared to $593 million for Europe and $169 million for the rest of world.
“We know that that monetization potential exists [outside of the U.S. and Canada], and now we’re really focused on executing to make sure that we take advantage of it,” said Crystal.
For this reason, Google’s former managing director of customer solutions Cecile van Steenberge was hired last month to lead Pinterest’s international enterprise sales teams across Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific.
Her first task will be to build out a full-time sales team on the ground across Europe, LATAM and APAC. In markets where Pinterest doesn’t have a sales presence, the team is working with partners like Google to open up ad inventory, as well as creating reseller partnerships to extend its brand and presence further.
Even so, growing a sales team and reaping the benefits of that kind of presence will take time to realize.
In the meantime, Pinterest will focus on growing its own AI-powered media buying tool Performance+ in a bid to attract smaller advertisers to the platform.
Like its competitors, Pinterest sees automation as the key to lowering the barrier for advertisers that can’t afford agencies, because the technology makes it easier to create, plan and buy campaigns. If Pinterest gets it right, the cumulative value of that long tail of smaller advertisers could ultimately outweigh a smaller pool of big spenders.
“SMBs are a critical part of our ecosystem, as advertisers, but also as content providers to the pinner ecosystem,” said Crystal. “But Performance+ specifically saves you time and it drives more ROI. It can make sense for some of our smallest advertisers, but it can also make sense for some of our largest and most sophisticated advertisers.”
Focusing on small and medium-sized businesses, AI and global expansion don’t exactly make up a novel strategy these days. Not when all social platforms are under increasing pressure to build more sustainable ad businesses, leading to a playbook that many are now following. But there are two pages Pinterest isn’t borrowing from the playbooks of competitors: social commerce and subscriptions.
Speaking about social commerce, Crystal made the point that Pinterest actually just wants to be a retailer’s best partner, and not their competitor.
“We want to focus on providing a high quality handoff and a great user experience, versus trying to capture the transaction natively on Pinterest,” he said. “We think it makes sense for our advertiser partners, who, ultimately, don’t just want to acquire a transaction, they want to acquire a customer. And we think that sending the traffic to them so that they can do what they do best, allows them to play to their strengths and us to play to ours.”
It’s a similar story when it comes to subscriptions, which has typically been used as an alternative revenue source to advertising altogether. Snapchat, X and Meta have all opted to build their own subscription-based offerings. Pinterest, however, wants to focus squarely on advertising.
“As organic experiences continue to improve, as we’ve increased the action ability on the platform and grown clicks 90% year over year in Q4, that’s created tremendous opportunities for monetization and for our advertisers to find new customers and to drive performance,” Crystal said. “We have so much runway ahead of us, with respect to the ads business, that really is the focus right now.”
https://digiday.com/?p=571010
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