Pinterest Opens Up Programmatic Buying, Betting Media Buyers Will Follow

Pinterest is making its ad inventory easier to buy the way the rest of the open web already does. The platform's new Programmatic Deals product lets media buyers purchase Pinterest display and video inventory programmatically, using Magnite as the primary supply-side partner (Pinterest is also part of Magnite Orchestration, an AI-driven coordination layer) and, in Latin America and Asia Pacific, Google Ad Manager as an additional supply-side option. On the demand side, buyers can access the inventory through Amazon Ads DVA+, Google Display and Video 360, and Yahoo DSP, meaning enterprise marketers can fold Pinterest into campaign workflows they're already running elsewhere instead of treating it as a separate, bespoke buy.

Pinterest is pointing to an early result to make the case: beauty brand Moroccanoil ran a June campaign adding Pinterest to an existing buy through a Magnite-enabled deal via Amazon Ads, and reported 15 percent higher incremental reach, a 20 percent higher click-through rate, and 63 percent more new-to-brand buyers than its average video and display campaigns, with only 1 percent audience overlap, meaning it was genuinely reaching people other channels weren't.

The move follows Pinterest's acquisition of ad-tech firm TvScientific and a string of programmatic-leadership hires, and it reads as a platform trying to graduate from a nice-to-have discovery channel into a default line item in a media plan. With 640 million monthly active users and an ad business still smaller than the giants it competes with for budget, removing the friction of a manual, direct-sold buy is less a nice feature and more table stakes for staying in the conversation when marketers build their media mix.

Source: Marketing Dive

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →