There are currently 70 million Pinterest pinners, and every one of them is about to get spinned to the marketing post.
From BostInno‘s Rebecca Strong:
Pinterest is Getting More Ads but You Might Have Trouble Spotting Them
Advertisers’ posts may blend in better on Pinterest than on other social media sites.
One thing that’s always separated Pinterest from the social media pack: It’s had very little advertising. That’s about to change.
In June, the company launched a program to test promoted pins from a limited number of brands, including including Nestle, General Mills, Kraft, Gap, ABC Family, Expedia and Lululemon. Now that we’re in the new year, that program will expand. As of [last week], Pinterest is letting advertisers pay to promote their pins, boosting the visibility of them (as on Facebook or Twitter).
Money graf:
Pinterest has been valued at about $5 billion by investors and has raised more than $760 million in venture capital to date, but still has little to no revenue to report. The company’s potential leg-up on competitors: Ads do seem to lend themselves better to the site.
Of course, “lend themselves better to the site” actually means don’t look like ads at all.
Holy Grail graf:
Dana Shank, an associate director at Kraft Foods, had this to say to the New York Times about her company’s advertising on Pinterest:
“We’re aiming for the holy grail here: trying to provide the right content to the right people, at the right time. To be on a platform where people are actively looking for that content? That’s invaluable to us.”
Invaluable to them. Invisible to us.
Holy grail indeed.
John R. Carroll is media analyst for NPR's Here & Now and senior news analyst for WBUR in Boston. He also writes at Campaign Outsider and It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
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