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The Pinterest Australia and New Zealand office hasn’t been open for a full year yet, but already the team is deep into its key focuses: making more relevant content for the market and improving the industry’s understanding of how to use the platform.
The Sydney-based team of more than 10 people was established in August last year and is headed up by Carin Lee-Skelton, who spent the past four years as a partner manager with the ideas-sharing app in the UK. Prior to that, she was at social media giant Facebook for six years.
She’s joined by Spotify’s former head of sales Cassandra Gilbert, who steps into the role of agency lead. Also on the team is Frank Masterton (ex-Buzzfeed), Kim Hollisand and Alex Gogh who all join as partner managers.
The local office, the third for the company in the Asia Pacific region, was opened after Pinterest had strong results with clients in the market, says Lee-Skelton.
“We’d already been working with partners such as Telstra, Kayla, Optus, Woolworths, Myer and some smaller brands such as Koala and Modibodi,” Lee-Skelton tells AdNews.
“We had already seen great success and great traction coming from the market, so we decided to put a team on the ground and continue to work with businesses such as brands, but also publishers and creators in the market.”
Other big names Pinterest has worked with include Apple, Revlon, Bonds and publisher News Corp.
Since being founded in 2010 in the US, Pinterest has grown to have more than 2000 staff across the globe and 335 million monthly active users. Seven million of those users are in Australia, according to Nielsen. The platform also boasts 200 billion Pins, or ideas, that have been saved on its platform across the world, with nearly four million of them in Australia so far.
Lee-Skelton says her team has kicked off by helping provide creative content that is relevant to the market.
“In Australia, one of the core focuses for us is to continue to work with businesses in this market to make sure we are creating the best localised experience for people on the platform,” she says.
“This is by us working with brands, working with publishers in the market and also working with creatives.
“If you’re just looking at last year, we’ve continued to grow the user base globally to help bring our mission to life, which is to give everybody their inspiration to create the life they love.
“The more people are using the platform, the more local content will come onto it. We can see now more than ever how making sure we’re serving up local content that is going to be relevant to people and their lives is incredibly important.”
The audience of Pinterest leans heavily towards women, who make up 70 per cent of its user base, and while Lee-Skelton sees them as a valuable asset, she’s also looking at attracting more men as a way to boost its audience.
“We’re very proud of the women we have on Pinterest and the fact they’re finding value in our services, and we know they are the financial decision makers in our top categories, such as food, style, beauty and home,” she says.
“But we also know that a third of our audience are still men, and we continue to be attracting more of them by increasing the relevance of content. Regardless of whether we’re thinking about men or women on Pinterest, what is really important is that the mission of the company is to bring everybody the inspiration to create a life they love, no matter where they are in the world, and no matter what demographic they are.”
Pinterest launched advertising in Australia and New Zealand in 2017. Globally, the company’s 2019 quarter-four revenue hit US$400 million, up 46 per cent year-on-year. Full-year revenue grew 51 per cent year-on-year to US$1.14 billion.
Like all businesses, Pinterest has had to adjust to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the past few months. While it’s created challenges for the business, the platform was boosted as people passed time while stuck at home around the world.
In the early weeks of the pandemic, the platform saw an all-time high in activity, with more searches and saves during one of the first weekends in lockdown than any other previous weekend in its history.
“We know this is a very, very troubling time for many people and businesses and we’re fortunate enough we can work from home,” says Lee-Skelton.
“But from a Pinterest perspective, now more than ever, people are turning to Pinterest to find things that are going to be useful and helpful in their immediate day-to-day life.
But even though Pinterest has benefited from a boosted audience, the pandemic leaves Lee-Skelton unable to predict the long-term impact the pandemic will have on advertising revenue, which has been hit like so many other media companies.
“At this stage, we’re just going to continue on with business as usual as much as we can,” she says.
“At this time we are still going to continue to send people useful information on what people are doing on the platform, whether they use that just for their daily lives or whether they can use that for their businesses.”
A key focus has been to educate the local market on the opportunities of the platform, for both new and current advertisers.
“We continuously see new brands advertising, whether it be big advertisers or small advertisers,” says Lee-Skelton.
“But we are looking at advertisers across different verticals as well. For us being new in the market, one of the big focus areas is going to be ongoing education and comprehension of the product.
“What we find is if we can spend time with these brands, publishers and creatives and help them understand what Pinterest is and what is the mindset of people coming to the platform, that automatically helps them understand how their strategies can fit in on Pinterest. That really is a differentiator for us.”
That “differentiator” for Pinterest is the fact it’s not a social media company, as it is commonly referred to as. Instead, unlike popular apps such as Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, Lee-Skelton says people don’t go on Pinterest to connect with friends and family, or to follow the news.
“They’re coming to Pinterest to ultimately plan for their lives,” she says. “They come onto the platform with a very open and receptive mindset because they’re in the very early stages of browsing and discovery, but they don’t yet know what they want to do or what they want to buy.
“What you find is that 97% of searches on Pinterest will be unbranded, and that’s because people are in the very early stages of browsing and discovery. But they come in with this commercial intent as well because they know they want to get off and actually do things with what they find on Pinterest. Generally what we always say is that Pinterest should feel like you’re walking into a mall filled with the world’s best ideas.”
This expectation from users to see products on Pinterest means brands shouldn’t feel as though they’re interrupting users’ experience, says Lee-Skelton.
“We still have a long way to go [in educating advertisers] and that’s why it’s still a core focus for us to continue to work with brands, integrate with the publishers and creators to continue with that education and comprehension of the platform.
“Last year was really about getting the team in place to continue to work with the partnerships that had already been created in the market. This year more than ever it’s about how we bring these locally relevant and inspiring stories out into the world. We are just seeing some beautiful cases of how people are using Pinterest in the Australian market.”
Even before fears of COVID-19 caused Australia’s economy to slow down and changed our lifestyle almost overnight, Lee-Skelton says the market was already dealing in a difficult environment.
“The Australian market has had a number of challenges. We’ve had bushfires, we’ve had floods, and now we have the coronavirus as well,” she says.
“So now more than ever we just need to make sure we are working with our partners as closely as possible.
“I’ve always said to the team that one of the most important things is for us to always be thoughtful and helpful. This is important now more than ever. It’s about making sure we can make these changes as easy as possible for our partners and continue to be that support for them.
“It is just genuinely a tough time for many businesses and we just do our best to remain focused and continue to support our partners as best we can during this troubling time.
“Pinterest is not a place where people are going to see what is going on in the news or what their friends are doing. In fact, it’s an escape for a lot of people and it’s a utility to help people cope during this time.”
“It is just genuinely a tough time for many businesses and we just do our best to remain focused and continue to support our partners as best we can during this troubling time.”
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