Pinterest, Inc. (PINS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We are thrilled today to have Ben and Todd from Pinterest with us to discuss the latest of everything going on at Pinterest, the latest everything going on in the online ad market. There's always a lot to talk through. So it's great to see you live. Thanks for taking the time.

Thank you for having us. Yes. Appreciate it.

Let me start with the disclosures. Please note that all important disclosures, including personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures appear on the Morgan Stanley public website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures or they're also at the registration desk. Some of the statements made today that interest may be considered forward-looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements that Pinterest makes are based on assumptions as of today, and Pinterest undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to Pinterest's Form 10-K for a discussion of the risk factors that may impact actual results.

Okay. Want to sort of start high level, a little bit, Ben, you talk about sort of 4 strategic priorities for Pinterest inspiring content, shopping, the pinner experience, the advertiser experience and advertiser success. If we sort of look at the last year or so, talk to us about -- of those 4, where have you made the most progress? And then give me the other side of going forward, where do you see sort of the most opportunity and room for improvement and further innovation in those 4 as you look into '22?

I mean it's a great question. I mean I think we made progress on all 4, but I think there are probably at different levels of maturity is the way I think about it. So look, on this idea of inspiring content, that's kind of the newest area for us. We've been talking to a lot of folks at this conference about just that. But about a year ago, maybe a little bit more, we made a pretty meaningful investment in starting to build a short-form video creator ecosystem. Kind of we looked at how consumers were getting inspiration and kind of where that market was going. We felt like there was a really special place to play there. And so, we launched a lot of that at the end of last year. And so that's probably the earliest in the development, but really excited about the direction it's going. If we talk about shopping, that's been a journey that we're -- we've been on for a little while now. And we've, over the years, started to build out a really large catalog of high-quality inventory. We partnered with Shopify. We have APIs to bring in a lot of content. Then we use computer vision to sort of map that against all of the pins in the system. So when someone sees something inspiring, they can find a product from a credible retailer. And what we started last year was really to build in these shoppable surfaces. And so that's something we're going to continue. We're piloting things like native checkout. And then on the advertising side, like advertising is never dull, as you suggested, there's always a lot of improvement there. But we've been really focused on a few areas. And they kind of come down to kind of a few big buckets, like one is we want to increase the value for advertisers, which usually, in turn, means better relevance for Pinners so investments in machine learning, investments in more and more sort of first-party signal and measurement. And we've also really seen a lot of success with automation. So taking a lot of the work out of advertisers' hands and kind of our vision is you come and you've got your objectives, your [ creatives ] in your budget. And over time, we take care of the rest. And so we've been on this automation journey. It's been a big driver of value for advertisers, for Pinners and for our business, and we still see opportunity to continue that in the future. So different areas and different levels of maturity, but they're all pretty important because they come together in one experience.

Okay. And as part of that, there are a lot of platforms and social platforms and apps on people's phone. Everyone is competing for time. So if you could sort of just lay out for us, how do you think about the unique or differentiated aspect of Pinterest versus other social platforms or other platforms people could use like, how do you win share of time and share of people's minds?

Yes. From the beginning, kind of we've always thought of ourselves as a tool that's meant to take people from inspiration, so getting that feeling, that idea of what you want to do in the future, all the way to realization. So you imagine what your living room can look like. We connect you to the imagery to help you refine that. We actually then let you buy the products. You imagine what you might want to wear in the future. You eventually end up wearing that outfit. And that's a pretty different value proposition than a lot of other apps on your phone, right? It's not about talking to your friends. It's not about reading the news. It's not about killing time. And so whenever we take off an initiative, when we think about a strategic priority, where it starts is we're talking to our users, and we call them Pinners about what would advance that journey. So when we talk about creators, it's a different value proposition and say, making a funny short video to share with your friends, like that's a clear use case or pure entertainment. We're trying to say, what is the role of creators in short-form video in helping you go from inspiration to realization? Similarly, when we build features around organizing content or around shopping, they're all trying to take you down that journey. And that's been the sort of center post of the product since the company was founded. And then we use different technologies, different product features, all that try to drive that central value proposition.

Okay. The creator economy focus, there's a lot of platforms that are competing for short-form video, competing in the "creator economy" is very in vogue in general. So I guess the question is, what -- part one, what types of stats or numbers can you share with us on signs of early success with your creator and short-form video efforts? And then as you sort of think about how you differentiate for creators, how do you differentiate for creators' content versus all those other platforms?

Yes, it's a great question. There's definitely like a lot of noise in the system. So just taking a step back, like I talked about the user reason why we think creators can play an important role. We looked at it a couple of years ago, we're like, oh, short-form video, that's just one way you're getting ideas for how to work out, how do we decor your home. And so that was really important for us. If you flip it around on the business side, Pinterest has always been a service that's used a little bit more periodically than a social service, right, a life event, a seasonal moment and creators provide sort of another reason for people to come if you find a creator that you really engage with and you really connect with. And in the last quarter, we shared 2 early data points that kind of speak to that pattern. What we said was that what we've observed is the Pinners that are following quite a few creators, they both visit more frequently, suggesting they're there. Find out, what did that creator put that's new. And they tend to spend longer or going more deep in those sessions. Those are early. We've got to scale that. There are hundreds of millions of people around the world. But those early signs of what we call liquidity between the creator and their audience, those are really positive. And so our job now is to scale that and grow that over time. Now the way that we scale it has to be true to the platform, right? And that's where this question of differentiation really comes from. I think when people think about when they say creators sort of in a industry standpoint, it sounds like there's one economy. And in fact, a creator is any person that expresses themselves creatively through media and wants to earn a living from it. And so if you look at the features that we've built, we're trying to differentiate in the things that will help. So on the publishing side, some of the first features we put in were things like the ability to tag recommended products. So if I'm showing you kind of an item that you might want, I can automatically put that in. Affiliate links, we use AR, but instead of using AR, for example, to kind of change how you look. We use AR to model like how makeup might look on your face because a lot of our creators are interested in that. So one is on the creative asset. The second will be on what we rank and what we prioritize. So we'll look at, of course, how often people engage, but it won't be a pure time spend model. Like there are a lot of things on any of these platforms that you spend time on, but that may not necessarily be consistent with our mission of taking you from inspiration to realization. And then over time, that will turn into economic models that reward that kind of behavior, which we think will tend to be more transactional rather than pure volume-based. So we're in early days, but I think those are the dimensions when as you look across all of these different platforms talking to creators that are worth thinking about like what's the creative innovation? What are you really rewarding in terms of distribution? And then what is the economic model? And I think the different platforms will have slightly different answers as they mature over time.

That's good color. So Todd, let me ask you some of the revenue impacts and sort of how we think about the impacts of this in the near term. You talked about then sort of shifting some of the engagement towards the creator and the short-form video products. The monetization there is earlier if at all. A couple of questions. How do we think about the size of that headwind, the shifting engagement towards short-form video in the first quarter for the year? And what inning are we in of that shift? How should we think about how long it's going to be for incremental headwinds of this?

Yes. Look, that's a great question. And thanks for having us. It's nice to be back in person again, see everyone. We've talked about this over the last couple of quarters, but the impetus behind us and the investment we're making in this creator-led content ecosystem is that we're going to drive more engagement, and it will be revenue accretive over time. So we think it's a healthy thing to do for the 5-year value creation story for the company. So that's a starting point. But Ben said it, we have a highly monetized or well-monetized grid or traditional service. And we're introducing our users to Idea Pins and our Watch tab, which is a new surface that's got a nascent monetization program against it. So anytime you're moving users from a highly or well-monetized surface to one that's got a nascent monetization program, you're going to sacrifice some revenue. We think that's the right thing to do for the company and for the user experience over time. Over the last couple of quarters, though, that's cost us probably mid-single digits in terms of revenue growth. I think we called that out a couple of quarters ago. It was captured in our guidance and ultimately into the performance in the fourth quarter. And whatever word you want to use to describe that a subsidy or whatnot, that we think is something that will persist as we're scaling engagement on that surface or against that content ecosystem until we get monetization associated with it. We feel comfortable doing that because we've seen a similar dynamic with our shopping engagement. Over the last couple of years, we've invested in building a more natural shopping experience on Pinterest, building high-intent surfaces for people to discover products and ultimately transact and enticing advertisers through an API to get their shoppable content on to Pinterest. That's something that we didn't major in monetization against. We wanted to put the right content in front of the user at the right time to enable them to buy things that match their taste. Over time, we've shown that we can monetize that shopping engagement through promoted content. The same thing will be true here, and it just will take some time for us to do that over the next few quarters.

Is the -- to monetize that content, is the plumbing or the back end already built out to do that where it's just sort of a philosophical decision of when you decide to turn it on? Or is there more investment sort of innovation needed to really monetize this as new form of engagement?

Yes, I think the short answer is we're continuing to build this out. We have the tools. We had a big launch in October, which I'm really excited about the innovation that the team delivered. We had a big moment in the fourth quarter around delivering that. So the plumbing in terms of the creator, the basic content development platform, it's built. And we have some formats that can work for monetization, but there will be a lot more development over time depending on what kind of engagement we see and where we see the economic opportunity develop.

Okay. Great. I want to talk about users and traffic a little bit. 2021 was somewhat of a more difficult year from a user retention perspective. Maybe a jump-off for either of you. Maybe can you just talk to us about some of the reasons where you sort of looked back at what drove some of the user losses you had, whether it's geographic, use case or other factors that you might call out? Then as you sort of look ahead, what are the keys to sort of stabilizing the user base, in particular, in North America and then really growing it?

It's a great question. So 2020 and 2021 were incredibly challenging and unique years for us. We saw during the initial pandemic-related lockdowns back in 2020, our users were trying to solve new problems in their life. How do I decorate my home office, how do I cook meals at home, how do I work out in my living room? And the engagement around what we're typically at home use cases, we're very resonant with our core kind of home in food content on Pinterest. So a lot of overlap between where we were very strong and new problems that our users had in their life. What that meant was that we had an influx of users and the depth of engagement that ramp very quickly, that was kind of an inflection point in 2020. And as the pandemic restrictions unwound late in Q1 a year ago, we saw a lot of that go away. A lot of that was web-based traffic or desktop and mobile web traffic that as use cases shifted, we saw those users who came in early in the pandemic shift away. There are a couple of things that I look at that give me confidence that we're on the right track overall. Our mobile app users were quite resilient. We've called this out over the last couple of earnings calls, the number of users that we have and the resilience of our users on the mobile app, which is where we get the bulk of our impressions, and our revenue was much more resilient than our overall user count factoring in the web-based usage. The second thing is we've been investing in shopping experiences over time, then called that out at the beginning. And our shopping engagement continued to grow nicely through the fourth quarter. It was up 20% in the fourth quarter versus the third quarter and year-over-year again. So that kind of resilience around one of the key economic drivers for the company was really nice to see. And then lastly, you often get the question about demographics and how you might age out of your audience. We've been really excited about our traction with the Gen Z audience over the last couple of years. In that audience, we haven't broken it out publicly, but it continued to grow in the fourth quarter, and that's been a much more resilient audience for us than the other demographics. So that's a source of confidence.

Okay. I know in the fourth quarter, you also talked about some recent Google algorithm changes having an impact on the users. Google keeps making changes. So I guess the question on the algo changes, can you sort of talk about how this algo change was different or similar than others in the past? What was the impact you saw on it? And how do you think about the impact of algo changes just sort of going forward on the user base?

It's a great question. So it's a related comment to the web-based traffic point that we were just talking about. The bulk of our engagement, the vast majority of the engagement on Pinterest comes direct. Someone opens the app or they type in the URL. So number one, we have a lot of direct engagement that's highly resilient. However, our search-driven traffic is an important way for people to revisit. So you're googling some new problem that you have in your life. You see a solution that's Pinterest content and you come back to Pinterest. So there's a revisitation piece of it. And if you're a new user, it's a way of discovering Pinterest. So it's not unimportant. I often get the question, why don't you disclose something different than you disclosed because this is one way to drive longer-term audience growth and longer-term economic potential. They just happen not to give you -- give us as much economic potential in the moment, but they're an important way for us to grow our audience over time. We've seen this dynamic before. This is not something new. When we were marketing the company 3 years ago in the IPO, we were dealing with a lot of eyes on Q2 2018, we had a user decline and the question came up, what happened? Similar dynamic, Google made an algorithm change. There were some identity issues with Facebook. Our users declined in Q2 of 2018. We responded the same way we're responding today. And every other time, there's been an algo change. We find a way to make sure that the best content is served higher in the user search results on Google. And when that happens, we see a recovery in that traffic. We had a similar dynamic last summer. In Q2 of 2021, there was an algo change that impacted Pinterest across geographies, most notably in international markets and emerging markets. And we responded the same way we are today, which is to go back and make sure that the right content is served to users in a way that drives healthy engagement. And that will be the way out of this particular cycle. When they happen, there's usually a dip and then we recover over time.

Got it. Okay. That's all part of the first quarter guide you made, right?

Well, we -- so we wanted to update people. There are a number of factors going on. There's the COVID where we started was what's going on with COVID. There's still -- I think we're almost through this use case shift. I'm hopeful. We're all seemingly back to something that's approximating normal here, but we're still watching that unfold. We lap all of that impact in Q1 versus a year ago. So I'm kind of watching that with cautious optimism. The response time and what others do with their search algorithms is something that's still an open question. So we need to work through that. And it's obviously a very competitive environment for people's time and attempt -- our users' time and attention. So we're monitoring that as well. What I did in our earnings call, our last earnings call was, give a real-time update as to where we were. I think it was on the 2nd of February, so that I was giving as much visibility as I had in the moment. But those 3 factors that I listed are things that I pay very close attention to and will over the course of the year.

Okay. Let's return to the advertiser story a little bit. Automated bidding and sort of the ad tech stack that you built out really did seem to make a very big difference in the slope of the advertising growth than just your advertiser spend. Could you sort of walk us through now the life cycle of -- when advertisers join your platform, what does the life cycle look like 1 quarter, 2 quarter, 3 quarters in? And when you talk to your advertisers, what are the key sort of constraints to growth to continuing to keep the advertising spend growing rapidly?

Yes, I can start, like so taking a big step back, like first time meet a CMO, like why [indiscernible] Pinterest kind of important. We've been doing this all over the world. What CMOs generally are most excited about is the idea that there's a place where people have commercial intent, but they haven't made up their mind on what they're looking for. That's a pretty important thing, right? If you don't have commercial intent, you're pushing into a situation where you have to have a high volume of ads that tend to be interruptive. And if they're way down the intent funnel, you can often close conversions, but often you're almost being double tax. You're not generating incremental demand, you're often bidding on your own keywords. So that understanding, coupled with, is there an audience of value there is like the very first step. And to do that, we educate them, we show them that audience is present. We show them the nature of the behavior. And that's kind of the first step. Then you kind of go into this sort of testing and then scaling where essentially they learn how to use the platform, and then they see good returns on those ads, and it scales up. Your question was about automation and how that's helped that. And the great thing about automating things like bids and things like campaigns, is it just makes it so much easier for people to get better returns. And the automation story has been really exciting because what we've seen are people basically show -- we show fewer ads, and they have higher click-through rates. So from a user's perspective, that's great because they're seeing ads they really care about. Often the prices are actually a little bit lower because the system is optimizing across it, and they're getting those conversions. That in turn drives up ROAS. The next sort of step in automation for us really comes down to kind of campaign management advertising, which disproportionately impacts kind of medium-sized advertisers because they literally have a smaller staff on board to manage things like scheduling dayparting and time of day. And so that's going to be a big focus for this year. And then with advertising, then we're always looking at how else can we make it great for Pinners and great for advertisers. And one thing I've been really excited about is kind of the growth and the strength in the retail sector and in particular, in shopping ads. It's great for advertisers because they have a very clean return on ad spend. It's great for Pinners because one of the #1 things that we hear from Pinners is like, "Gosh, I love this inspiring imagery, but I want to do is I want to buy stuff". And so it means they can actually fulfill it. There's nothing more frustrated than seeing something you're excited about. You tap on it and then you're on an image and then you can't get it and then you're just left wanting. And then it's also great because as more transactional behavior occurs on the platform, it makes it easier for us to measure in light of sort of the changing privacy landscape that's happening right now, which is making it harder to track in a so-called multi-touch or long conversion windows. So all those things are kind of working in the same direction in a positive way, and we're investing in measurement, in formats and in automation to try to drive that benefit over time.

Okay. Let me go back to the shopping point a little more. So I think you raised a very good point about you need a lot of inventory. You need a lot of SKUs on the platform to make it a good experience. If I go and I search for golf clubs and you have tailormade, but you don't have Callaway, not a good experience for me. Even though I like tailormade. What -- where have you made the most progress in getting more inventory on the platform? I know the Shopify partnership has helped. But as you sort of sit here, what's the biggest hurdle or a constraint to getting as much inventory as possible on the platform to make a better user experience?

Well, so top line, the hardest thing is getting all that data into a rationalized format and making sure it's really high quality. So we've kind of gone through 3 generations of that. So when we started, we had this thing called the Verified Merchant Program. And it was verified because we wanted to make sure that when people first saw products on Pinterest, they weren't going to get scammed. They were high-quality merchants. We then obviously had a partnership with Shopify, which we expanded globally last year. And also last year, we allowed kind of multi-feed API, so people can load that in. And then we have teams internally that are always looking at how do you clean up that data. Now what makes it hard is that every merchant does this a little bit in a different way, right? You're talking to merchants that range from direct-to-consumer that might have 3 products to fast fashion, where they're turning stuff over and size and color really matters, and it's changing all the time; two, people that have a more stable catalog that isn't changing very often; and what matters at the end of the day is if you're a consumer and we display a price, a color, a description, it has to be accurate at the moment that you see it. So building all of that is kind of the first step in building that really rich catalog. Then you got a big catalog, but a big catalog isn't very useful. And so then what becomes really important is how do you show people the right product for the right time. And if you search golf clubs, that's actually kind of a solved problem. If you search it on Amazon or on a sports website or a Google, you can get to there. When we say shopping, what we really want to be able to do is show you things that you may not be able to easily describe because you may not be able to describe the aesthetic, but we can guide you towards that. And when people talk about shopping in the offline world, when people are like, I like going shopping on the weekend. Like what they don't mean is like buying a very specific thing, that sort of transactional and there's value there. What they mean is they like discovering something they haven't seen that's personalized for them and discovering something else. And we think that opportunity is still wide open. And we think Pinterest is positioned to go execute on that. So the second step is really that personalization of the recommendation. And then the final piece is how do you facilitate the transaction. So we're just starting to test seamless checkout to remove the friction from it, so it's easy. We've kind of been progressing on those 3 dimensions at once. And I'm also excited because I think creators could play a role in that. I don't know about you, but like when I buy things, I'll often watch a video, where someone is handling it, they're showing how it fits, they're showing what it looks like. And so if we can build a creator ecosystem where people are helping consumers feel more confident in their purchasing decisions, all those things sort of benefit all the key stakeholders in the ecosystem, right, the retailer, the user, Pinterest, the business, and the creator.

Is that how you think about monetizing the creator economy and make sure the creators get compensated? Is it through a split on that transaction? Is it through an ad RevShare? How do you sort of think about philosophically compensating the creators?

I think we're looking at different options. And I think that you're going to see different economic models emerge for different creators. So we haven't sort of drawn our final line in the sand. But I do think that a lot of these creators, their aspiration is, hey, they want to be able to make this passion part of their living. And so you're seeing in the industry a ton of different experimentation. And one sign that it hasn't fully been figured out is you're also seeing a lot of funds that are sort of subsidizing this as the economic models mature, from all these different platforms.

Okay. Todd, let's talk about spending a little bit. In the fourth quarter, you guided non-GAAP OpEx growth to grow 10% Q-over-Q and then full year OpEx growth, 40%. So you're in investment mode. I guess a couple of questions here. One, just talk to us about sort of where are the hiring priorities down the OpEx line in the P&L. And then it's a pretty big OpEx build, my opinion. Can you just sort of talk to us about the [indiscernible] really honoring to ensure that you're investing in projects that deliver return for shareholders?

Thank you. That question comes up -- came up a lot today. So I think what you heard from Ben at the outset around our strategic priorities is that we have a lot of confidence in what we're building. And we have a lot of confidence that we're building the right things to create value over the next 5 years. So as a starting point, we're investing because we see an opportunity in front of us. At the same time, over the last couple of years, if you think back to 2019, we were at marginally -- we were close to breakeven. I think we were at like 1%, 1.5% adjusted margin in the year we went public. And then last year, we were in the low 30s. So we've seen a very steep ramp, and we've proven that we can get to our longer-term margin profile that we marketed at the time we went public a couple of years ago. We've been investing in exactly what Ben described. How do we build a richer product experience? We built all the infrastructure to have this creator-led content ecosystem launched in the fourth quarter of the year. We've diversified our advertiser base, not only within the U.S. but internationally into a variety of new markets. Our shopping experience has fundamentally changed. Those were all longer-term bets that we've been making over the last couple of years, and we showed financial results from doing so, both revenue performance and expanding margins. Right now, we see an opportunity to double down on many of those same things, including building out all of the research and development, engineering talent required to capitalize on the first-party signal we have, which is really rich signal about user taste and preferences to power improved personalization, recommendations, improved shopping experiences and ultimately build out the short-form video creator ecosystem in a way that will connect to shopping and commerce over time. If we get that right, I'm confident we'll be both accretive from an engagement perspective, meaning we'll see more people on Pinterest more frequently, and we'll be able to deepen our revenue per user potential over time. And so those are the things that we're thinking about building out more capacity from monthly active user growth, reducing churn and then deepening our potential to monetize those users, which would show up in revenue per user.

Okay. The last one I had for you is sort of the -- as the fourth leg of the table on international. We didn't talk at all about it. It's so early in international monetization. Maybe just a couple of questions here. As you sort of look at your more mature "international markets", are there any differences in user behavior in your larger international markets where you say they wouldn't be able to monetize similarly to the U.S. that we should think about? And then any learnings from a monetization perspective in those more mature markets that we should think about how quickly can you monetize the other countries?

I'm really excited about our opportunity outside the U.S. We were most developed in the U.S. a few years ago when we went public from an audience perspective, and we were still growing our non-U.S. markets from a user perspective, really, really rapidly a few years ago, and that opportunity has driven us to north of 400 million monthly active users. We were very -- I would say, not late, but we were very deliberate and thoughtful about how we moved our monetization efforts from U.S. focused to then international over time. And we've seen great results in driving revenue performance in those markets over the last couple of years, starting with English-speaking countries outside of the U.S. and then Western Europe or EMEA. And then last year, we launched advertising in Latin America, starting with Brazil. We're adding more countries this year, and we should be monetizing in Japan by the end of this year as well. What we found is the playbook in the U.S. works well. There are some technology changes, things like agency tools. We built business access to improve agency's ability to advertise on Pinterest. That's more important for international than it was for the U.S. International advertisers benefit from having a multi-feed catalog upload [ tool too ] because you're marketing products into different geographies with different price points. So there's some technology differences from market to market, but the user mindset, the commercial mindset of our users, the idea that you come to Pinterest to find a new idea and then take action against that idea over time is consistent largely with the same use cases outside of the U.S. as in the U.S. So that mindset, the way people engage, the types of things they do speak to the same type of economic potential. What's different is the depth of ad spend and the pricing opportunity in a lot of those markets, which is no different for us than it would be for our competitors. So you see that kind of discount in terms of revenue per user across the industry. I would expect that that's the one thing that changes.

All right. Well, it would be great to monitor all the progress [ you ] made over the course of the year. Thanks, Todd. Thank you very much.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.