Almost a year ago, Pinterest released a new ad product called 'Cinematic Pins'. Cinematic Pins, as the name suggests, are effectively video pins - the images move forward and reverse based on user activity as they scroll through the app.
This week, via the official Pinterest blog, the platform's touted the performance of cinematic pins, saying that "businesses of all kinds have used Cinematic Pins to boost their brand's presence on Pinterest".
Their first example provided is from L'Oreal Paris - via the use of cinematic pins, L'Oreal was able to boost awareness of their True Match Lumi Glow Illuminator by 30.7%, while purchase intent was boosted by a massive 37.2%.
According to Kristen Comings, Vice President, Integrated Consumer Communications, L'Oreal Paris at L'oreal Paris.
"Pinterest is the ideal marketing channel for L'Oreal Paris' products. Our audience is there to shop and discover new beauty products - not just scroll for fun - enabling us to capture them in a consideration mindset when they are further down the marketing funnel."
It's a pretty compelling example, and that cinematic pin certainly is eye-catching - it's not hard to see why the campaign was able to produce such impressive results. But then, of course, there's a high novelty factor involved - these pins stand out because they're different, they're moving in amongst a raft of static images which highlights them even further. That's definitely a key point of benefit for now, but if cinematic pins were to increase in use, their effectiveness, as a result, would likely decline.
The second example showcased by Pinterest is Reese's, who were able to boost purchase intent by 25% through the use of promoted cinematic pins.
The data goes some way to support recent suggestions that Pinterest is looking to add a video ad component to their market offering. According to a report on Digiday, Pinterest is already testing video pins amongst a small group of users - those with knowledge of the tests have said that the video pins will autoplay when a user stops scrolling over them, providing similar, interactive motion to cinematic pins. And given the success of cinematic pins, as detailed, it makes sense that Pinterest would be looking to add in additional video elements - combine that with the overall growth of video content on other platforms and you can see why Pinterest would be keen to get involved.
In addition to this, Pinterest has been pushing out more information to assist businesses with their Pinterest presence, with a recent blog post answering commonly asked Pinterest business questions and several others focused on current on-platform trends. This is par for the course with social platforms, but Pinterest has ramped up their activity of late, which would suggest they're making a bigger push in order to reach their ambitious target of $2.8 billion in revenue by 2018. For comparison, Pinterest forecast a $169 million full-year result for 2015.
Given that target, Pinterest has a lot of work ahead, but they are progressing, boosting their monthly active user count to 100 million and introducing additional features like Buyable Pins and advanced image search capabilities. Yet, as they do so, Pinterest may actually be moving away from being a 'social' network and more towards an eCommerce solution - which is not a bad thing, but the focus of the platform is, over time, shifting further from the social element, moving away from interacting with friends and more towards interacting with brands. This shift is evident in Pinterest's own numbers - currently 75% of Pins saved come from business boards. Does that mean we have to change the classification of what Pinterest is? Is it still a social networking site?
Pinterest itself defines its ambition as to "striving to build a platform with the scale and engagement of Facebook and the purchasing intent of Google".
Definitely, the numbers show that Pinterest is great for people looking to make purchases, an entire network of virtual window shopping, but within that context, the creators and curators of the platform matter less than the content itself.
Either way, Pinterest remains a solid performer, particularly within the realm of B2C, and the additions of new features, like cinematic pins, continue to up the platform's capacity to boost your brand and reach an audience with high purchase intent.