Brief:

• Home Depot and image-collecting app Pinterest expanded their partnership to offer more than 100,000 home décor items to Pinterest’s “Shop the Look” visual recognition feature. With the feature, Pinterest users can search and buy similar products they see in user posts, or Pins, by tapping a circle shown on their mobile screens, per a statement.

• The home décor products include vanities, faucets, lighting, textiles and tabletop items. The expansion of the visual search and shopping feature coincides with hardware chain's growing online catalog, including its of The Company Store.

• Pinterest this week rolls out its “Shopping Ads” feature after testing the service with a handful of retailers last year. The ads, which consumers see in their Pinterest search feeds, will now be available to hundreds of other brands after a successful pilot, per Ad Age.

Insight:

Pinterest's expansion of shoppable content follows closely on the heels of Instagram bringing its shoppable posts to eight additional countries in a significant international expansion. Together, these two pieces of news suggest that social shopping, which has struggled to catch on in a significant way, is starting to find its legs. Snapchat is also pursuing shoppable content, although it is proceeding more slowly. Earlier this year, a promotion with Jordan Brand for a limited-edition release quickly sold out. 

Pinterest continues to ramp up opportunities for large retailers in other ways as well. In September, the image search application with more than 200 million users partnered with Target to let people snap product photos and browse similar items for sale at the retailer. Several retailers are also partnering with Pinterest for in-store Pincodes that users can scan to access branded Pinterest boards. 

Home Depot’s expanded adoption of the “Shop the Look” feature follows this year’s campaign on Pinterest that demonstrated how to do home-improvement projects with video, images and a 360-degree interactive shopping experience. The video campaign, “Built In Pins,” included 30-second spots that illustrate how a couple transformed four rooms — bedroom, kitchen, living room and bathroom — from demolition to furnishing. The campaign's Pinterest posts includes guides on the methods pictured in the videos and which products were used, per Adweek.

On the advertising side of things, Pinterest’s expanded offerings give brands another choice in a digital media market dominated by Facebook and Google. Pinterest’s advantage is it gives advertisers a way to target users who already expressed an interest in a product or service by “pinning” what they see online. Google's shopping ads comprised 80% of all retail search spending of U.S. and U.K. advertisers in the first quarter of 2018, according to researcher Adthena. The search giant recently announced a push to enable cross-platform shopping in an attempt to support big retailers' efforts against Amazon.