Study: Pinterest users seek adventure, new brands and tech

Brief:

Pinterest users are more likely than average U.S. adults to be more adventurous, sensitive and materialistic, per a survey from YouGov published on Forbes. Those characteristics make users of the image-pinning platform a desirable target for marketers in industries such as travel, music, food and technology.
Sixty-nine percent of U.S. adults who use Pinterest at least once a week are considered adventurous, compared to 55% on average. YouGov defines adventurous as more likely to travel, interact with unfamiliar cultures and try out new products and services.
In addition, Pinterest users are more likely to experiment with new recipes, 81% compared to 69% of all U.S. adults. Pinterest users like trying new brands (76%), listening to new musical genres (64%) and interacting with emerging technology (57%).

Insight:

Pinterest is generating a lot of attention as the image-pinning platform prepares to go public next week, but the company also has worked to downplay expectations after disappointing IPOs from Lyft last month and Snap two years ago. YouGov's survey of U.S. adults reinforces the idea that Pinterest users are more open to new experiences and experimenting with unfamiliar brands. Pinners, as its users are called, share and browse collections of billions of images in categories such as home furnishings, travel destinations, cooking and fashion. That usage makes Pinterest an attractive platform for advertisers, especially when marketing brand extensions or new products and services.

Pinterest has taken several steps to appeal to mobile marketers in the past year. The site in August offered to all brands a bigger "max.width" ad format that's about four times bigger than its standard video ads and stretches the full width of a smartphone screen. In October, Pinterest debuted Product Pins that show up-to-date pricing and inventory information and also have direct links to a checkout page on a retailer's site to make a purchase. The company in February automated curation of its Shop the Look feature to reduce dependence on human employees to match images with the appropriate product links.

The image-sharing platform launched in 2010 at a time when the social media industry was still in its early days, but the company hasn't developed an audience as big as those for Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube. Pinterest's user base has grown to 265 million monthly users from 250 million last September, while revenue rose 59% to $756 million in 2018, per a public filing.