Late last year, luxury brands told Glossy that Pinterest was emerging as an important marketing channel to reach their customers. Now, brands are catching on to another important demographic they can reach on Pinterest: Gen Z.
According to Pinterest, Gen Z saves more pins on its platform than any other cohort, particularly in the collage format.
“They see Pinterest as a distinct and separate destination from other social media apps,” said CEO Bill Ready last month after the company’s first-quarter earnings call, when it revealed that Pinterest had crossed 500 million monthly active users. “As a result, Pinterest is actually aging down, a rarity in consumer Internet applications, which typically age up as they mature.”
The ability to reach Gen-Z shoppers, along with the platform’s recently launched capabilities, like collages and shoppable carousels inclusive of videos, has made Pinterest an increasingly attractive option for brands. Brands are also drawn to Pinterest’s potential for organic growth without the pay-to-play requirements of other platforms like Meta.
“Pinterest right now has grown massively for us from a revenue standpoint month-over-month,” said Liz Money, svp of brand and creative at the luggage brand Béis. According to Money, Béis’s revenue from Pinterest grew by 700% over the last three months. “And that was with a really low lift. We’re not putting any money into it. It’s just growing organically.”
Now, Money said, her team plans to put money into Pinterest to bolster the success to date.
Even brands that aren’t spending heavily on Pinterest are aware of its growth and potential.
“It’s not a big area of focus for us at the moment but we do see it gaining popularity among Gen Z,” said Linda Li Steiner, head of customer in the Americas for H&M. “What we’ve seen from our focus groups is that Pinterest users tend to take a bit longer to make a purchase, but when they, do they buy several things at once because they’ve curated a whole board of ideas.”
The collage feature, which launched at the beginning of this year and lets customers compile mood boards with pins and their own images, has become particularly popular with Gen Z. Gen-Z users are 70% of all collage creators, and collages, in general, are three times more engaging than other posts on Pinterest, according to the company.
Pinterest has also worked behind the scenes to make its platform more commerce-friendly. A partnership with commerce platform VTEX that launched last week allows brands to put their entire catalog on Pinterest with one click, for example. At a time when customer acquisition and digital ad costs are skyrocketing, brands are increasingly looking for platforms with the potential for organic growth and an engaged Gen Z audience.
Pinterest has also been spending big on activations like a Coachella pop-up where it paired festival goers with beauty and fashion stylists.
Pinterest’s revenue was $740 million last quarter, up 23% from the quarter before. Pinterest data shows that some of its biggest advertisers are dedicating up to 5% of their ad budget to Pinterest — a smaller share compared to Meta, but growing year-over-year. In 2023, Pinterest launched more new ad formats than any other year in its history, and Pinterest’s ad engagement in Europe was up 38% this past quarter. Also last quarter, ad costs on Pinterest decreased in price by 11%.
