Brief:
- Levi Strauss and Room & Board are among the brands testing Pinterest's expanded social shopping features, according to an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer. The image-pinning platform added more ways for its users to make direct purchases with personalized style and home décor recommendations, browsable sections, shopping searches and in-stock products from brands, per a company blog post.
- Levi's partnered with Pinterest to create personalized style boards that recommend its apparel based on a user's individual tastes determined by a questionnaire and style insights from their Pinterest activity. The Styled by Levi's program is the first custom style finder built with the Pinterest application programming interface (API) and supported by Promoted Pins, the pinned images that businesses pay to promote.
- Home décor retailer Room & Board saw a return on ad spend of 51 times from its Promoted Pins campaign and 33 times from its Shopping Ads campaign, exceeding its goals by 127% between February and June last year, per details shared with Mobile Marketer.
Insight:
The test cases of Levi's and Room & Board demonstrate Pinterest's power as an emerging shopping platform. The image-pinning app has historically aimed to distinguish itself from other social media sites with its emphasis on aspirational products and services. Pinners create personalized boards to collect images while planning events like weddings, inspiration for home remodeling projects, making travel plans or looking for new fashion styles, for example. Closing the loop between pinning an image and buying a product or service is a key way for Pinterest to support social commerce, grow its ad business and draw more brands and users to its platform.
Pinterest highlighted the Levi's and Room & Board early results while announcing updates to its Catalogs and Shopping Ads to help brands put products in new shopping spaces. Catalogs let businesses create Product Pins that feature updated pricing and stock information from a brand's online catalog. Shopping Ads, which help brands reach shoppers at the right time, are now available from a self-serve platform, which further positions the platform as an easy-to-use tool for marketers.
Pinterest is rolling out its new products as the company is said to be preparing for an initial public offering. Last month, it confidentially filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO that may come as early as late June 2019. The online-image search company is reportedly expected to seek a market value of at least $12 billion. Pinterest, as of September 2018, had more than 250 million monthly users of its app and website. Ad sales on the platform rose 50% to more than $700 million in 2018, a person familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal, highlighting how the social site has grown in terms of user numbers and ad sales over the past few years.
