Pinterest introduces Idea ads and paid partnership tools

Pinterest quietly launched a couple of new ad formats this week. Idea ads, and a new partnership tool allowing creators to tag brand partners in their content. 

Idea ads. The new Idea ads follow a similar format to Idea pins, which were launched last year. Similarly, Idea ads are an immersive, multi-page format designed for advertisers “to showcase ideas in action.” When shoppers click on the ads they’re taken to the brand’s website to view relevant information. 

The paid partnership tool. This allows brands to partner with Pinterest creators. The partnership allows large brands to collaborate with Pinterest’s’ community of creators and connect with their audiences. 

With the paid partnership tool, brands can review the tag and approve (or deny) the content. Brands will benefit from the authenticity of the creator’s content. Brands can also promote the creator’s content as their own Idea ad with paid partnership across Pinterest. 

Early adopters. An early launch of these tools showed that brands who worked with creators saw 38% higher brand awareness, and 37% higher Pin awareness. A few brands that saw success with this program in the US are Gatorade and Scotch Brand. 

Gatorade. Gatorade’s goals were to help its audience stay interested and engaged. To do this, they launched an Idea ads with paid partnership campaign on Pinterest. By teaming up with popular fitness creators, they created ads providing workout inspiration, and reminders to stay hydrated. As a result, they saw 34 million impressions, 99k clicks to their feed. 

“Handing over the creative power to a Pinterest creator allowed for an authentic moment of fitness that could only come from that creator. It made our ads feel new, natural and engaging.” — Johanna Lugo, Marketing Assistant Manager, Gatorade.

Scotch Brand. Scotch had a goal to create a hands-on approach to back-to-school shopping. They wanted to showcase ads for making supplies like pencil holders, teachers’ gifts, and more. They found popular search terms related to crafts and created kid-friendly how-to videos using Scotch tape. The results were a 64% lower cost per impression than their initial goal, and a 4x higher click-through rate than their average benchmarks. 

Outside of the US, brands like Coty Canada and M.A.C Cosmetics have also seen promising results. 

The new formats and tools are now available in over 30 countries. You can read the full blog post announcement here.

Why we care. Pinterest hasn’t really been on anyone’s radar lately. The development and (rather quiet) launch of these new features was quite a surprise. Creators looking to monetize their social media content should take note. However, the results coming from the early tests show benefits to larger, already well-known brands, but what about the creators? It would be nice to see more credit given to the people who made Pinterest what it was pre-ad platform – a place to come for ideas and inspiration.

I can’t help but feel like this is another way for large brands to take advantage of smaller creators. Using them to build effective ad campaigns aimed at audiences they weren’t able to reach through traditional means. It sounds rather familiar. Either way, we’ll be watching. 

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