As chief marketing officer of Pinterest, Claudine Cheever is on a mission to solve a problem most social platforms helped create: how to get people off their phones.
“IRL is the ultimate destination,” says Cheever. “We’re designing the exit. We don’t want you to stay here all day. We want you to spend some time here, get what you need out of it and then we want you to go out there and do it.”
In the spring, Pinterest launched a new brand platform that calls consumers to get off of social media and go outside. The effort has supported a number of campaigns including a :60 film called “How did they do it?” featuring old home movies and photos submitted by Pinterest employees from before the Internet. Another ad called “Get Outside,” shows a search on Pinterest for outdoor camping ideas. The tag line, “The best thing you can find online is a reason to go offline.”
“It is really about building the story of how Pinterest as a platform helps you create the life that you do want to live in the real world,” explains Cheever. “The campaign makes that stake in the ground of how we feel about that role between people and technology and then tells how the platform helps you make those positive choices so that you can get offline – go take a new trip or share a wonderful meal with someone that you care about.”
Brand Innovators caught up with Cheever from her office in Seattle to discuss the brand’s new platform, the company’s experiential activations and how working at Amazon taught her that without marketing, it would just be “a warehouse full of stuff.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Talk to me about Pinterest’s brand mission and how it shows up in the creative.
We have always been an inspiration company, but the second part of creating the life you love is really getting harder and harder to do in the world of technology from the internet showing you all of these things you’re supposed to be like or how you’re supposed to live. The idea that you’re living your life online instead of living your life offline, the real life that’s all about you.
We really are that bridge from the online to the offline in the best possible way. For 631 million global users, 96% of top search results are unbranded. Consumers are in this very open state of mind, but they also have a lot of intent or over half of our searches have a lot of commercial intent. They’re looking to build and buy and try things. They’re looking to make choices. It’s really that mission that we brought to life in our campaign was first recognizing we’ve all given up on social media. We have been pretending to live a life versus living the life that we really want.
Can you talk about the importance of showing up in culture and how you’re helping the conversation in culture?
You always want to be positioning your North Star on something that’s very timeless. Ours is something that’s going to endure over time. Part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is to have that self-actualization. But then we think about the context in which we show up. We want it to always be relevant. It’s one of the reasons we do go to Coachella. In Europe, we do music festivals. It’s one of the reasons why we’re showing up in women’s sports with our sponsorship of the New York Liberty, because fandom is such a rich part of culture.
Then also just the way the stories that we tell and the way we want to show up and just those everyday moments, whether it’s about picking an outfit or planning a meal. We have Pinterest Predicts. We analyze billions of keyword and visual searches. We look at all the data and rich signals we get from all the things our users are pinning and collecting and look at the patterns. We pull it from 24 months of trailing data. That gives us this rich view of the culture of what’s going to be popular and trending over the next full year. 88 percent of these predictions have come true over the past six years.We can really see from our own internal signals how people are creating their own culture and creating their own meaning.
What is your approach to working with brands and helping them connect to new audiences?
We’re always looking for brands that share a similar affinity for helping people be who they want to be and helping people develop their creativity. That’s why women’s sport is such a great partnership for us because it’s so much a part of fashion, music and women’s health. It really has this larger point of view about how to have a life well-lived. At Coachella, we might come in and bring that point of view in a more pointed way and that’s where our audience is. Music festivals are so great because there is this freedom of self-expression. What a 16- or 18-year old might wear to Coachella is probably not what they’re going to wear to school. They spend a lot of time figuring out what their outfit’s going to be. That self-actualization and self-expression is really looking for brands that can do that.
We’re also looking for any brands that are really hungry to figure out how they can build that URL to IRL journey. It ranges across so many different categories from fashion to travel, even things like financial services. Our North Star is broad enough that we can really have a lot of different partnerships with brands.
You mentioned Coachella. Pinterest also activates at Cannes. Can you talk about why IRL matters and your experiential marketing strategy?
It’s really the ultimate destination of where people live their lives. You’re not actually living online. The data shows that the more time people spend online, the more they feel drained, the more they feel like they’ve wasted their time. Forty percent of Gen Z now report that they wish social media had never been invented. That’s a pretty powerful stat. For us, the IRL is where life is lived. Obviously we are a digital platform. So how do we connect to IRL? It is about starting online and then building that bridge and giving them all the tools they need.
How are you thinking about Gen Z?
They’re on this really early journey of developing their taste. Developing your taste is really defining who you are. You develop it over time. If you see one black t-shirt, you might know if you like it. After you see a thousand, you really know what kind of black t-shirt is you. For young people, it’s the safe space where they’re not being influenced by others, they’re not being shown a perfect life that’s not something that they really can or want to have. We hear that Pinterest is my quiet place. We really think that a healthy part of mental wellbeing for young people is to be able to develop that sense of who they are. It’s a really important audience for us because they’re beginning to form those early brand preferences, but we really want to build it for the things they really want and the things they really care about.
Talk to me about how your past at other brands like Amazon helped shape your perspective where you are today.
I’m always looking for a story to tell and for brands that are really differentiated and have the courage to pursue that point of view. At Amazon, the story was about selection and convenience, but it was still an emotional story. How do we tell that in a way that reminds people of a brand that they’ve gotten so used to. It’s so omnipresent that we want to reignite that relationship.
For Pinterest, we have a strong point of view and a really great story to tell. Then it’s about getting that story out to more people. I love refreshing people who may not have an up-to-date understanding of where the brand or the business is at, that constant reconsideration. As marketers, you’re never done. People don’t walk around thinking about brands. They just don’t. We always have a job to do, which is reminding consumers of who we are and what has changed.
We have users who’ve been with us on a whole journey of life stages. Maybe they joined when they were planning a baby shower and now they’re at a different phase in life. We want to tell them we’re here for meal planning or for planning an outfit for the weekend. It doesn’t have to be a big project. It can be little ‘c’ creativity. It was very similar to Amazon. Without marketing, it’s just a warehouse full of stuff. You really need to tell that story.
Are there any marketing challenges keeping you up at night?
No matter where you are, no matter how big your budget is, there’s always more things that you can and want and probably should do than you have resources, time and money to do. It’s always an exercise of constraints and trade-offs. That’s always the toughest part of the job. You can come up with 10 really big priorities and they’re all the right things to do and you really are only going to be able to do five of them. I’ve found that when I’ve had massive budgets, I’ve found that when I’ve had not so massive budgets. It’s always the same exercise of portfolio planning and trade-offs. So it’s challenging.
I also find that really exciting because it really builds trust and it really brings the team together when you can put on that bigger hat and say, okay, today I work for the Pinterest pinner. What’s the best decision for that person and for those 631 million people? It’s hard because you leave stuff on the cutting room floor that would be awesome.
