Pinterest’s new ad format automates personalized messaging

Dive Brief:

Pinterest this week introduced a customizable advertising format that lets marketers automate the process of building personalized creative to target specific audiences. Advertisers can make multiple versions of Pins from digital assets or a product feed, automatically importing product data such as price, location and availability for target audiences, per an announcement shared with sister publication Marketing Dive.
Pinterest named RevJet, StitcherAds and Smartly.io as approved partners to provide software tools and templates to design dynamic creative ads, helping advertisers reduce the time and effort that would otherwise be required to create hundreds of customized ads for specific audiences to drive sales. Marketers also can run tests of the creative to compare which ads drive the best performance.
The new performance-driven format comes as Pinterest looks to support shopping-related behaviors on its platform, which saw an 85% jump in the number of Pinners engaging with shopping surfaces in the six months ended Sept. 30.

Dive Insight:

Pinterest's rollout of dynamic creative ads aims to make it easier for marketers to customize their messaging on the platform, whose user base grew 13% to 98 million in the U.S. and 37% to 442 million worldwide in Q3 from a year earlier, according to a quarterly report. Pinterest already gives marketers a way to target specific audiences with ads, and now RevJet, StitcherAds and Smartly.io can help to automate the process. Dynamic creative lets marketers use a library of images and information that are automatically combined into a personalized ad based on real-time audience data, eliminating the need for manual customization.

With its new format, Pinterest is catching up to platforms like Facebook and Snapchat, which already offer dynamic creative, underscoring how the automation media buyers have come to expect with programmatic ads is increasingly extending into creative.

The early results of customized creative on Pinterest are promising, as StitcherAds explains in a blog post. The company, which gives marketers a way to customize ads on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, said its clients who optimized their ads for Pinterest saw positive results. Those metrics included an average 55% jump in conversion rates and 11% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS). Meanwhile, the average cost per purchase declined by 7%, according to StitcherAds.

With more people shopping online during the pandemic, personalized ads that drive business outcomes have become a bigger priority for marketers. However, customizing ads can be a time-consuming process for creative teams, both in-house and at agencies. About a third (72%) of advertisers agree that social media ad creation and delivery require manual procedures that often are time-consuming, Smartly.io found in a survey. Automating the process can save time and money for marketers, while delivering better sales performance.

Pinterest's addition of dynamic creative ads follows other efforts to expand its range of offerings for marketers, including those seeking a direct response. The company in September began offering ad placements in the "shop" tab in text search, visual search and shoppable Pins that are linked to an e-commerce site. The company last year also let people shop for products they find with its Pinterest Lens visual search tool that uses image-recognition technology to identify objects with a smartphone camera. The company in April unveiled the "shop" tab to help people find in-stock products from text searches.