Pinterest Opens Its Inventory to Programmatic Buyers, With Magnite as Its Main Pipe

Pinterest is selling its display and video inventory through programmatic platforms where its advertisers already plan and buy media, after testing the setup with agencies and brands since early this year. Pinterest has announced general availability of Programmatic Deals in North America, South America, and Asia Pacific. Ad buyers can now transact through private marketplaces, preferred deals, and programmatic guaranteed deals in Amazon Ads, Google Display & Video 360 and Yahoo DSP. Pinterest needs the new demand. The company guided to third-quarter revenue growth of 13% to 15%, down from 18% in the second quarter, when revenue reached $1.18 billion. Pinterest will report third-quarter revenue on Oct. 29. “The investment and focus on programmatic is really about making Pinterest available wherever buyers want to activate,” said Jason Fairchild, gm of programmatic and affiliate at Pinterest and CEO of tvScientific by Pinterest. “Major brands increasingly want to activate programmatically because it introduces more automation and efficiency into the process.” Magnite is Pinterest’s primary supply-side platform, and Google Ad Manager handles supply in Latin America and Asia Pacific. Pinterest’s inventory is also a part of Magnite Orchestration, a layer where AI agents can find, evaluate, package, and activate ad inventory. The pitch rests on what people do on Pinterest before they buy. The company says it has 640 million monthly active users who run more than 80 billion searches a month, with more than half of those searches for commercial terms. “We've transformed into a visual search and shopping experience,” said Chip Jessopp, gm and vp of adtech sales at Pinterest. Gen Z is the platform’s largest growing audience, he said, and curating deals around the audience “really helps to open up omni-channel buying where we can fit in.” For buyers, the draw is convenient. Through a DSP, a brand or agency can “mix and match data providers or measurement providers, and also mix and match media partners, all in one place,” Fairchild said. An Amazon DSP buyer, for instance, can use Amazon Marketing Cloud to tie an ad on Pinterest to a purchase on Amazon. Pinterest’s audience data also travels beyond its app through tvScientific, the streaming TV ad platform it acquired earlier this year. The programmatic push has been building since last year, when Pinterest named Magnite its SSP partner and hired Jessopp from Amazon as its first head of programmatic. Earlier this year, Fairchild’s role was expanded to cover programmatic and affiliate revenue. Jessopp said the alpha has since grown across major agencies and advertisers, but stopped short of sharing specifics. The one campaign Pinterest shared came from beauty brand Moroccanoil, which added a Pinterest deal as a supply source to an existing Amazon DSP campaign in June. Pinterest said the addition increased the campaign’s reach by 15%, with 1% overlap between Pinterest’s audience and the people the campaign was already targeting. Click-through rates on Pinterest ran 20% higher than Moroccanoil’s average Amazon DSP campaign, Jessopp Said. Meanwhile, The Trade Desk is absent from the list of launch DSPs. “We’re engaged with everyone that matters,” Fairchild said when asked if it plans to expand its DSP partners. Pinterest declined to say how much of its ad revenue runs through programmatic channels. “The answer is it's growing,” Jessopp said, noting that advertisers so far are treating programmatic as an addition to Pinterest’s own ad tools. “This is yet another way we're making sure that we're within that consideration set,” he said.

Platforms

Pinterest Opens Its Inventory to Programmatic Buyers, With Magnite as Its Main Pipe

The platform is making its display and video inventory available through Amazon, Google and Yahoo’s DSPs

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Trishla Ostwal

Programmatic

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