First announced in December 2025, Pinterest’s acquisition of tvScientific, a CTV performance advertising platform, marked a surprising development in the rise of performance TV, while signalling the social sharing site’s most signficant move into the CTV space. Following the completion of the takeover back in February, today Pinterest has announced the launch of its audiences in the CTV market, bringing together its audience signals with tvScientific’s ad platform.
Pinterest noted that CTV ad spend in the US is expected to surpass linear TV spending over the next two years, with performance advertisers helping fuel that growth. “As streaming platforms have become a primary way consumers watch TV, movies, and other content, advertisers are increasingly seeking more channels to reach high-intent audiences and drive measurable performance,” the company said in today’s announcement. “tvScientific by Pinterest is the first ad platform to offer direct access to Pinterest’s high-intent audiences for CTV campaigns.”
By bringing its audiences “off of Pinterest and on the biggest screen in the house”, the business aims to help advertisers find relevant viewers, using its commercial intent signals to reach audiences that use Pinterest to discover and search for products. According to the company, using tvScientific’s platform in conjunction with Pinterest’s high-intent signals drives 27 percent uplift in outcomes per $100 in spend, and 65 percent uplift in purchases.
“Pinterest brings a distinct opportunity, with more than 600 million monthly active users and growing,” said Lee Brown, Chief Business Officer at Pinterest. “Because of how users search and shop on the platform, we can give advertisers new ways to reach people at every stage of the shopping journey, from discovery to buying, both on and off Pinterest.”
Underpinning CTV’s growth
Video has been a major focus for Pinterest over the past decade, ramping up its efforts with a series of product launches and video formats. The company first introduced video ads back in 2016, before launching a ‘Watch’ tab on users’ home page in 2021. That same year, Pinterest launched Pinterest TV, a live video offering featuring shows and shoppable live streams from its creators.
But the tvScientific acquisition sees the focus shift away from its own website and app, and into the CTV space, at a time when the US CTV market is seeing notable movement from performance budgets. Attracting those advertisers onto TV comes with its own set of challenges; the performance metrics available on search and social channels has made those investments easier to justify, while TV has historically struggled to prove its value in driving measurable outcomes for performance-focused advertisers.
But tvScientific has built an outcome-based CTV platform with the explicit aim of going after the digital ad market, rather than brands who would traditionally be spending on TV. The business helps “advertisers of any size run their own CTV campaigns, pay by outcome, and use data to validate TV’s impact,” according to the newly formed tvScientific by Pinterest – and with the social sharing site’s audiences available to reach through CTV campaigns, the company aims to bring further precision for performance advertisers.
“The real opportunity for advertisers is turning consumer intent into action, and Pinterest’s signals are unique because they reflect what people are planning, not just what they’ve already done,” said Jason Fairchild, CEO of tvScientific by Pinterest. “Every month, there are more than 80 billion monthly searches on Pinterest, and by bringing those signals into tvScientific, advertisers can run more precise CTV campaigns and optimise toward the business outcomes that matter most.”
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