Pinterest amps up performance tools, including a visual search product

Pinterest equals performance. Or at least that’s what the company wants marketers to think.

At its Pinterest Presents advertiser event in New York this week, the platform introduced a slew of performance marketing offerings, including Visual Search Ads, which allow advertisers to show up in search results on the platform or when a user expands a Pin.

It’s the latest performance marketing offering for advertisers that are facing pressure to show results from their advertising spend in a challenging economic reality. Pinterest, which has been emphasizing intentional time spent online in its consumer marketing, also used the event to tout its leveraging of AI to personalize algorithms more closely to users, making it the latest tech company looking to use AI to power user customization.

“For much of our history, Pinterest was a great place to build awareness, but not to drive results,” Bill Ready, Pinterest CEO, said onstage. “I’m proud to say that Pinterest is now a performance platform.”

Performance anxiety: Pinterest’s performance ad tools announced at the event extend beyond Visual Search Ads. Pinterest announced that its campaign automation suite, Pinterest Performance+, will include a feature called Priority Products, which lets advertisers highlight certain products more in specific moments, such as during a promotional period or a seasonal debut. It’s also integrating self-serve campaign A/B testing across its platform, including Pinterest Performance+. For advertisers focused on boosting app installs, Pinterest debuted a feature called App Promotion that’s in global beta for certain advertisers.

“Automation is, of course, still the default, but now there are a host of new features to steer it towards the outcomes that matter most to all of you,” Chloe Wix, VP of GTM and innovation at Pinterest, said at the event.

Pinterest is also leaning into AI to further personalize feeds and connect consumers to brands. It has built out Pinterest Intelligence, a combination of first-party data, visual understanding technology, recommendation systems, and “fit-for-purpose” AI models that drive Pinterest’s algorithms, Matt Madrigal, Pinterest’s chief product and technology officer, said onstage.

Pinterest Intelligence not only zeroes in on what users are searching for but also can predict what they might be interested in next, he said. The system identifies user interests and how they may relate to what Madrigal called “highly specific taste clusters” and can take into account users’ evolving preferences as they browse on the platform.

“We tried the classic social playbook, organizing our feed like everyone else’s [and] including viral challenges and clickbait-y content,” Claudine Cheever, company CMO, told advertisers in the room. “People on Pinterest are deciding what to try, buy, or do next. They’re looking to discover brands, not scroll past them on their way to the next Pesto the penguin video.”

Bird’s-eye view: Pinterest isn’t the only platform leaning into performance advertising products. Peacock rolled out several performance ad tools at NewFronts in March, including the CTV-oriented targeting and attribution tool Outcomes+. Amazon also enhanced its Brand+ ad product in July with audience signals that seek to boost performance.

It’s also not the only platform looking to AI to enhance its algorithms to personalize content for users. Meta, for one, continues to invest in its advertising-focused AI models to match ads with users.

“The internet has gotten very good at answering the question you asked,” Madrigal said. “Pinterest is built for the moment right before that, when you’re still trying to figure out what you want.”