Why Pinterest’s top product marketer thinks the company can own search

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First there was Ask Jeeves. Then there was Google Search. Could Pinterest be next?

Julie Towns, Pinterest’s VP of product marketing and product operations, thinks so.

“Search as a product offering for consumers is more up for grabs today than it has been in the last 25 years or so,” she told us.

At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Towns sat down with Marketing Brew to share more about the company’s newest experiment, the AI-powered conversational search tool Ask Pinterest, and about why the company is positioning itself as an antidote to the endless scroll. Here are a few highlights.

On owning search: At this time of consumer behavioral change, we’re really well-positioned…Search as a product offering for consumers is more up for grabs today than it has been in the last 25 years or so…One thing I’m surprised by is how willing and excited consumers are to have longer-form conversations, and Pinterest is really leaning into that trend with some of the changes we’re making in our own offering. Ask Pinterest is one of them, but we’re also, in our main app, adding more conversational elements, so that consumers have new ways of decoding images and finding products and brands that really match their aesthetic and preference.

On the company’s offline strategy: More than 50% of us teens say that they’re spending too much time on social platforms, and at the same time, we’ve seen in our own data, users searching for things like “analog aesthetic” over 200% more than in previous cycles. There’s this real desire to be more conscious about your media consumption. And when you are spending time online, which we know many people will continue to do, they really want to spend their time well and have something that feels inspirational, creative, and kind of additive to their life…we wanted to tap into that feeling that is already happening and what our users are already telling us.