Earlier this year, Pinterest completed its acquisition of tvScientific, a CTV performance ad platform. The social sharing site then brought its audiences off-platform for targeting in CTV environments, and last month launched Creative Advisor, an AI-powered creative optimisation tool for CTV advertisers.
In Cannes, VideoWeek caught up with Chip Jessopp, VP, GM Programmatic Ads Sales at Pinterest, to discuss the acquisition, the company’s CTV roadmap, and the channel’s performance credentials.
Some saw the tvScientific acquisition as a surprising move for Pinterest – how does the move into CTV align with Pinterest’s strategy?
When you think about Pinterest and our audience, 630 million users come to Pinterest every day because we are a visual search and shopping platform. We have over 80 billion searches a month, and we capture that rich intent signal and are are able to help advertisers make that connection with consumers in that environment.
But extending that off of Pinterest is really a big motivator. When we looked at tvScientific, there was almost a perfect alignment between the signal we have, the audience we have, and what they’re doing in bringing a performance lens to CTV – which is very different from thinking of CTV as just moving over linear TV, where it’s bought in terms of reach and frequency.
So it was really about bringing together the rich intent signal, reaching those audiences in CTV, and bringing that measurement, optimisation and transparency all the way through to prove that value for advertisers. So that was the intent behind it and we’re really excited with what we’re seeing already.
What does the longer-term CTV product roadmap look like for Pinterest?
Right now we’re heads down trying to bring the platforms together. The first thing that we announced was being able to bring the taste graph, which is all of our intent data, and allow the tvScientific platform to train on that data. Just in that alone we’ve seen a 65 percent increase in outcomes and conversions.
Step two was then making the audiences available for targeting. And as advertisers want to be able to reach that high-intent Pinterest audience, looking at CTV and other channels is certainly within the roadmap. But first and foremost we’re focused on bringing these platforms together, and we still have some work to do there.
Pinterest recently launched Creative Advisor – can you tell us what the new tool does and how it works?
We’re really excited about Creative Advisor. The aim of the tool is to bring a level of measurement and optimisation to TV that hasn’t previously existed. What tvScientific has done with AI is being able to evaluate the creative of any asset running, and the rich elements within it. So thinking about branding, call to action, even the voice, the length of it, all of those elements, we can understand how those correlate towards driving that conversion.
tvScientific have years of historical data to benchmark against, so no longer are you thinking about benchmarking purely against reach and frequency; we’re now benchmarking against, are we getting the right audience with that rich intent signal? But then more importantly, in real-time, are we able to measure the creative and understand what optimisations we can make?
Some of the early advertisers that have onboarded have seen a 13 percent lift on average in conversions as a result of the early learnings and optimisations we’re making. So we’re excited with that level of transparency, measurability and optimisation that we’re able to bring.
Attribution has long been a challenge in CTV – how do you go about closing that loop for performance advertisers?
It’s one of the big drivers, and when we were looking at tvScientific it was one of the biggest things that we were really appreciative of in the work that they have done. They were able to drive that measurement by doing integrations with the MMPs (mobile measurement partners) of the world, being able to do integrations with site-level tracking for advertisers, understanding exactly what is the outcome that they’re ultimately driving towards, and being able to measure and show the value of that upper-funnel.
And I think from a Pinterest perspective, we are able to bring that into how we think about measurement more holistically, which is wanting to be able to meet the marketer where they are with whatever measurement they’re doing. We have our own measurement capabilities, but we use third-parties to trust and verify those performance optimisations. And that’s a tremendous amount of work that the tvScientific team had already done, and one of the first things we were able to do was bring our conversion capabilities together right away.
Pinterest audiences are now available for targeting in CTV – what kind of audiences does this unlock for advertisers?
If you think about the breadth of our audience and those 80 billion searches per month, 96 percent of those are unbranded. And so when you start to think about the level of contextual content that we can bring, we can understand the high-level categories, but also we’re able to get deeper in being able to segment those and understand what is that true intent, and bring that onto the platform.
Whereas in the past it was more demo-oriented targeting or past purchase behaviour targeting, we’re now creating the link between what is that future intent? Where is that opportunity early on where brands haven’t even entered the equation? Reaching audiences on CTV gives a tremendous branding opportunity, and we’re really excited about that. So when you think about standard Pinterest targeting, we’re able to bring that level of targeting to CTV.
To what extent have you seen the move bring in incremental spend and new advertisers coming to Pinterest?
We’re still in the early innings but so far we’ve been really surprised and excited to see what we had originally built the hypothesis on, which is being able to take Pinterest advertisers and use the audiences as an extension on CTV. But we’ve also been able to see tvScientific advertisers that weren’t on Pinterest, so we’ve seen that crossover happen as well.
I think what’s really resonating the most is, one, being able to reach that high-intent audience, but two, the performance lens of it. And I think a really good example is a case study that we recently released with LG, which was working with tvScientific, and when we applied Pinterest audiences, we saw a 76 percent increase in reach and addressable households based on the targeting and categorisation. And then being able to measure the outcomes, we saw a 24 percent increase in conversions and outcomes as a result of that incremental reach. So being able to bring those two together really is starting to prove out the hypothesis we have and the value proposition we can bring to advertisers.
Does CTV still have work to do in proving its performance credentials?
Absolutely. I think we’re still early with CTV. We’re starting to lay the foundation, and advertisers are coming to the table and looking at CTV, and especially the growth opportunity that exists in being able to reach consumers. And when you think about the level of transparency, optimisation and measurability that they’ve come to expect across any digital campaign, they’re going to expect that in CTV.
So we saw tvScientific as being a leader in the space in that regard, and being able to marry that with our intent data. I think there’s still a lot more work to be done here, but I love the trajectory that we’re on and the position we’re in to help bring CTV along on that journey.
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