Pinterest launches video ads
Firm stands to benefit from the videos if users consider them useful, experts say.
SAN FRANCISCO — Pinterest may be late to the video advertising party, but it stands to reap great benefits, according to business and marketing experts.
The online bookmarking platform launched Wednesday promoted videos — ads that exist alongside its static image-based ads called promoted pins. When users click on a promoted video, it will play with sound and also link to relevant pins of products for sale. A video ad for makeup might, for example, link to a page where visitors can buy the product and also direct users to images of various beauty looks they can create.
Although Pinterest’s foray into video ads comes more than a year after its social media rivals such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat launched video advertisements, Pinterest is not so much a straggler as a methodical company that’s playing a different game entirely, analysts said.
“We need to stop thinking of Pinterest as a social network like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter because it’s actually more of a discovery tool,” said Jessica Liu, a senior analyst at research firm Forrester. “Users go to Pinterest explicitly to discover and explore products, whereas users go to Facebook and Instagram to engage with other people, publications and brands.”
As such, users might actually welcome the addition of video ads and view them as useful, as opposed to intrusive, said Jim Nail, a Forrester analyst who specializes in video advertising.
“If you look at Facebook, where video ads appear in a feed, people scroll past the ad very quickly,” Nail said. “With Pinterest, people visit because they want to buy something, so a video that shows the product being used, or a customer testimonial, that can be very powerful and useful to that consumer.”
In the last year alone, Pinterest saw a 60% increase in the number of videos people saved to its platform, according to Mike Bidgoli, the product manager who oversaw promoted videos. This growth happened organically across multiple categories, such as cooking, hair and makeup, home improvement and workouts, without any encouragement from Pinterest itself.
Of the billions of links and images saved to Pinterest every month, around 75% of them come from businesses, Bidgoli said. And every one of Pinterest’s advertisers has at some point requested a video advertising feature.
“So we knew consumer and advertiser demand was there, and we knew it was the right decision for us,” Bidgoli said.
The company was wise to hang back and see what marketers want, said Adam Berke, chief marketing officer of ad tech company AdRoll. Firms that have rushed to adopt new technologies for the sake of checking off a box often get burned, he said.
Which isn’t to say that Pinterest’s move into video advertising is sure to pay off. The company is dipping its toes into video ads, initially with a handful of vendors such as Kate Spade, Purina and BareMinerals.
It remains to be seen whether the ads will drive clicks and sales. But given how methodical the company has been, market analysts like Paul Verna of EMarketer believe that Pinterest’s users and advertisers are prime for the move.
“It’s a natural progression,” Verna said. “They could have done it earlier, but I understand why they wanted to do it right.”