Pinterest Emphasizes Digital Discovery

E-commerce is increasingly shifting shopping from an experiential to a transactional experience, presenting new challenges for brands including erosion of loyalty and limited options for discovery. Speaking during a keynote presentation at P2PX, Pinterest head of vertical strategy Brian Monahan shared how the platform can help brands combat these issues by bringing back the craft of merchandising in a digital format.Monahan shared how the paltform enables discoverability by providing guidance to users about other types of content that might go well with their existing searches or boards. Pinterest's search engine also doesn't require exact words to describe what users are looking for, instead emphasizing the visual aspect of search by letting them tap on interesting pins as follow-up queries. Additionally, search results are personalized for each user by the Pinterest Taste Graph, which constantly refines its understanding of a user whenever they search or save a Pin. Board creation on the platform offers further insights into what users are planning to do with their information, and is used to tailor search results as well as targeted ads.As a result, Pinterest users wind through the platform and ultimately often discover something they weren't even thinking about. "For brand partners, that means incrementality and driving people to new categories," Monahan said.This "possibility driven merchandising" is at the heart of how Pinterest is building its branded experience: connecting items to larger possibilities in a user's life, and doing that at scale. The other key element is putting merchandised items in context of how they will be used. Pins displaying items in contextual scenes receive 40 times more engagement than those using a simple catalog-type item listing.While Pinterest is often viewed as a social network, but Monahan insists it is fundamentally different from platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter."Pinterest is about being yourself, not your selfie," Monahan said.Rather than showcasing what has happened in the past or what is happening now, Pinterest is about planning for what is going to happen in the future. That makes for a better shopping platform because users come to Pinterest with intent, and 55% of people use the platform to find and look for products, Monahan said.Pinterest's job is to help its users realize their possibilities and move from planning to action, which is why brands are such valuable partners, according to Monahan."There's a lot of technology we can build together beyond the common ad product that we sell, including having APIs you can use to power some sort of experience," Monahan said.He shared an example of a program with Campbell Soup Co. dubbed "Recipe Reality Check" that acknowledges the difficulty involved in actually making some of the aspirational recipes saved to Pinterest. The program leverages a first-of-its-kind algorithm to identify recipes with unusual ingredients, long preparation times or obscure cooking techniques, and ultimately provides similar but easier meal ideas.The effort has generated 170 million impressions (and climbing), more than two minutes of engagement on average, and return engagement from one out of every five users. It also led to Campbell's content being pinned 2.6 times more often than during the previous year.Pinterest continues to evolve its capabilities, recently introducing several new functions that enhance the shopping experience, such as a crop and zoom tool for visual search, auto play for video views, and the ability to search by snapping a photo of an object in the real world. Target is jumping on board and will integrate that same lens right into its mobile application.The platform also is experimenting with new products that will give brands greater versatility, including removable pins to showcase limited offers, mobile deep linking for "add to cart" functionality, Pincodes that are similar to QR codes, and linking to incentives with partners such as Ibotta.

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