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

[Presentation]

Welcome to Pinterest Presents, and thanks so much for joining us. In the last year, we've accelerated our pace of innovation to lean into the things people love most about Pinterest and to deliver better, more measurable performance for our advertisers in the process. I'm proud to say it's working. More people are coming to Pinterest for more reasons and they're coming back more often. Gen Z is our fastest-growing demographic by far. And they've been the largest driver of our engagement growth. In fact, they are also our most engaged audience. Pinterest has always been known for home decor, fashion, beauty and recipes. But people of all ages are exploring more interest than ever. Pinterest is increasingly a destination for the best ideas in travel, health, auto and men's apparel, too. In other words, more people are seeking inspiration for their entire lives, and they're coming to Pinterest to turn those ideas into action. Brands are a critical part of that journey. In fact, more than half of people say shopping is the reason they're on Pinterest in the first place. Our partners have told us for years that they believe in the potential of shopping on Pinterest and they have been waiting for it to be real. Now it is. In the past, you could easily window-shop on Pinterest, but the actionability wasn't clear. It's like all the stores were closed. Now we are opening the stores, we're making everything shoppable. That's every image and every video. Shopping is now seamlessly integrated across all our core surfaces. Engagement with shoppable content is up 50% year-over-year and accelerating. And when a user wants to buy, we're giving them a seamless connection to your app and website so that you gain a customer, not just a transaction. Beyond our focus on shopping, we're harnessing next-generation AI to improve ad relevance and building solutions for every objective up and down the funnel. We know that you're all under pressure to prove the value of your investment, no matter where it sits in the funnel. So we've also made Pinterest more measurable from first impression to last click. We've tripled the number of ad products released this year versus last, and we've got more new things to announce today. We've only scratched the surface of the growth Pinterest will bring to advertisers of all sizes. This is just the beginning of all the progress we've made. I want to end with the work I believe is most meaningful, and that's building a more positive place online. Earlier this year, the Surgeon General of the United States, released data showing that young people who spend more than 3 hours a day on social media, face double the risk of mental health problems. The report directly ties the rise in depression and anxiety among young people to constant and unrestricted access to social media. It does not have to be this way. In June, we treated The Inspired Internet Pledge in collaboration with the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital. One of the Pledges' core principles is to tune for emotional well-being. Here's how we do that. For years, social media companies have tuned AI to maximize view time. And it's led to feeds filled with triggering content. It's created engagement via enragement. Instead of tuning Pinterest for views and unconscious user actions, we're shifting to more conscious actions like saves because it more reliably shows us what actually inspires people. That's why Pinterest isn't filled with the triggering [indiscernible] content you see elsewhere online. When we tune more for what people consciously choose, we see the more positive action-oriented content like step-by-step guides and self-care ideas rise at the top. In addition to tuning our products for emotional well-being, we're also testing for it. We want people to leave Pinterest feeling more positive. So we partnered with UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center to actually test that. Their study looked at the impact of just 10 minutes a day on Pinterest among university students. It found that Pinterest buffered against rising burnout, stress and social disconnectedness for Gen Z. While this study was in the U.S., we also replicated the findings globally. While we're encouraged by these results, we're not applauding ourselves for these findings, and you shouldn't either. What matters is measuring outcomes over time and continuing to make deliberate choices that benefit people. Some examples of these deliberate choices include things like our inclusive beauty filters, diversity by default and search results and our recently introduced body type AI, an industry-first technology to make sure more people feel represented here. People and especially young people should see themselves reflected online. So we're committed to building a more inspiring, inclusive Internet while also actively measuring the impact of our design choices along the way. The mental health crisis is a global phenomenon. Solving it is a global need. And online platforms have a meaningful role to play, but we cannot do it alone. The people and companies that fund the Internet are the ones who can fundamentally change it. This industry needs accountability. So start with us at Pinterest. If we don't come through on this pledge, if we don't keep our promises, don't advertise with us. I've got a 9-year-old daughter who's just starting to get online. I'm sure many of you have young people in your lives that you love and care about, too. Our kids deserve better, a better Internet, that brings out best selves, a place that is additive instead of addictive, a place that actually improves your emotional well-being. I want to help build that. We know that so many of you care deeply about this too, as advertisers, as parents and as people who simply want our industry to do better. Your feedback and partnership on these efforts has meant so much to us. And we're committed to working even more closely with you to build a better Internet together. Thanks again for being here. Enjoy the show. [Presentation]

Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining today's town hall. We've got a very exciting, very jam-packed agenda. So let's get started. For the past year, the team has been building new ways for Pinners to engage more deeply with the content that inspires them on Pinterest. We're on a mission to make every pin more personalized and ultimately more shoppable. So today, I'm really excited to share just a glimpse of what we've been working on. First, let's talk about some truths that led us here. People aren't on Pinterest to mindlessly scroll. They come to dream, make future plans and ultimately turn their inspiration into action. Until now, the art of dreaming and planning on Pinterest is primarily taken place by saving and curating pins. And while Pinners love their boards, we know they've been craving more visualization tools, more ways to play, to be creative and to truly craft their vision before it becomes reality. And so we're giving Pinners a new way to curate and share their ideas on Pinterest, introducing Collages. Collages are our new way to personalize ideas on Pinterest. Let's break down how it works. Let's say you come across a pin, and in the background of the scene, you see a lamp that you absolutely love. Now you can make that lamp the star by creating a cut-out. You can then save that individual lamp cut-out to a Board or you can add it to a Collage with other cut-outs to create your dream living room. With Collages, Pinterest becomes your personal sandbox. You can finally share the picture that's in your head with others. Visualization tools like these, they've historically only been available to professionals, designers, stylists, artists, but new Pinterest visual technology and AI innovations are now enabling us to scale these capabilities to everyone. Just recently, we started testing these capabilities with our sister app, Shuffles. And we've been pretty blown away by what people are creating and sharing. We see that Gen Z in particular, they think in collage. It's how they build their outfits, express their love for their favorite artists and manifest the next best version of themselves. Early testing is showing that people save Shuffles content at a higher rate than other types of pins on Pinterest. And Gen Z Pinners, they engage with collages like these at twice the rate of other pins. Our vision is that all products will be shoppable in Collages, just like everything else on Pinterest. And Collages are another way that we can bring even more joy to the online shopping experience. For brands interested in getting started now, our guidance is the same as our shopping advice, update your product catalog on Pinterest. All uploaded products will automatically become shoppable cut-outs for Pinners to use in collages. Starting today, Pinners will be able to make and save cut-outs of products they see on Pinterest. And over the course of the next few months, the full Collages experience will be rolling out to Pinners globally. So that's Collages. But in addition to the work on the consumer side, we've also laid our most comprehensive advertising product road map to date. It's been a big year, and I'm excited to turn it over to Julie to share more.

Sabrina's right. Product innovation at Pinterest is at an all-time high. And we're building with the goal to be the industry's best and only true full-funnel solution. So let's talk about how we're driving people from discovery to decision to do, starting with our highest impact format yet, Premiere Spotlight. Premiere Spotlight is a premium video solution that puts brands, front and center. It takes up about half of the mobile screen and these exclusive placements can be bought on a guaranteed date on either home feed or top of the search page. Gatorade was one of our earliest partners, and they were able to make a splash together with their agency, OMD. But don't take my word for it. Let's hear what they had to say. [Presentation]

So that's our newest solution for driving discovery. Now how do we move customers towards decisions? I'd like to introduce 2 new formats, Showcase Ads and Quiz Ads. Each Showcase Ad is the collection of pins stitched together for those campaigns where one visual just isn't enough to tell the whole story. With this new format, brands can create rich interactive experiences without having to update their website or create a micro site, and Pinners can easily get more of the info they need before making a decision. L'Oreal Paris showcased several shoppable skin care routines and saw a 65% higher engagement and 40% higher click-through rate when compared to other ad formats. Now on to Quiz Ads. With a few simple questions, brands can help Pinners pick the right rewards credit card or even decide what custom features to add to their next vehicle. Hill's Pet Nutrition built a questionnaire that helps people figure out what kind of pet was right for them. And the campaign drove an 80% quiz completion rate, which is just insanely high. Although I'm not surprised, people really do just love their puppies. Both Quiz Ads and Showcase Ads will be broadly available this fall, and we're excited to see the creativity that advertisers can bring to them. Now moving to the very bottom of the funnel. This summer, we opened mobile deep linking to more advertisers. It's a great fit for retailers who want a seamless handoff to purchase within their own app. And advertisers are already seeing a 235% lift in conversion rates and 35% lower CPAs while using it. So to build on that success, I'm excited to share that we're also planning to offer more direct-to-site capabilities in the back half of this year. But we want to drive performance for every brand, not just retailers because we've seen that every plan or project someone has on Pinterest can lead to a purchase. For example, tens of millions of people on Pinterest engage with travel content each month. So this summer, we launched travel catalogs to help turn Pinners' travel dreams into reality. Hotel and rental brands can now upload their full travel catalog, and from there, we'll automatically create dynamic product ads for each listing. These ad show details like pricing and descriptions right on the pin and when someone clicks, they'll navigate directly to the booking site for that listing. Here's what German travel brand, TUI had to say about travel catalogs. [Presentation]

So from brand-building formats like Premiere Spotlight to conversion drivers like travel catalogs, that's how we're building for the entire customer journey from discovery to decision to do. But we've also been busy building ways to simply just make our advertisers' lives easier. We worked really closely with GroupM to develop a suite of business manager tools that make it easier for agencies and portfolio brands to launch, plan and manage their campaigns. And finally, I want to point everyone to Pinterest Academy, it's our brand new e-learning program. It's designed to teach any advertiser, large or small, how to get started on Pinterest and build successful campaigns. It is the place to learn more about all of our ad solutions, including everything that I've covered today. And if you haven't tried it yet, as soon as I'm done talking, get over to pinterestacademy.com to get started. Now I want to turn it over to Nadine because our ad solutions are even better when they tap into the natural ways that people are using Pinterest today. Nadine?

Thanks, Julie. Whether it's planning a costume for Halloween or a Sunday family dinner, moments big and small, start on Pinterest. We know that people start searching for ideas earlier here than on other platforms. And that landing mindset means that we see the trends that will define these moments much earlier than others. This year, we introduced our new global programming calendar to bring together this powerful combination of moments and trends. Here's an example. At the start of the year, we noticed a growing trend in searches for creative date night ideas. So ahead of Valentine's Day, we bought the trend together with the moment and inspired Pinners to swap the standard dinner and a movie for something totally unique this Valentine's Day. And the really exciting thing, we offer brands the opportunity to partner with us around these moments. Today, I am delighted to share that our 2024 global programming calendar is now live for advertisers to preview and build campaigns around. Alongside the calendar, we're also offering an entire spectrum of partnership opportunities, from create a content to full-blown customized packages. So let's look at a few examples. This May, we created Wedding Week as a way to surface all the incredible wedding-inspired content on the platform. We noticed searches for wedding guest outfit inspiration. We're up a whopping 3,800% year-over-year. So we partnered with a U.S. fashion brand for a Wedding Week takeover as a way to showcase their newest wedding guest pieces. Nearly every aspect of the campaign was co-created with us, and they were among our first partners to use the new Premiere Spotlight format with a co-branded video featured on the search page. The campaign culminated in a 90-minute shopping event, all about wedding guest fashion. But what I love most is that it was a campaign built around content that was useful, actionable and inspirational, Pinterest at its very best. We design bespoke campaigns to suit the needs of the brand. So take, for example, our partnership with Maybelline, on their Brave Together Campaign for Mental Health Awareness Week. Actually, why don't you hear about it directly from them. [Presentation]

Now we simply helped Maybelline tap into our creator ecosystem. Nothing any fancier or more resource-consuming than that. But it was powerful, because it was the right conversation in the right environment with the right audience. That campaign and its impact couldn't have happened in the same way anywhere else online. These are the kind of moments that are made on Pinterest. And we are standing by, ready to help brands create even more moments that matter in the years ahead. That's it for me. Back to you, Sabrina.

I want to end today with one more exciting update. We have an early preview of a visualization tool we're building specifically for advertisers. The same Pinterest visual technology and AI that powers Collages is powering a new way we're helping businesses create more personalized shoppable pins. It's called Creative Studio. Creative Studio brings the benefits of generative AI to businesses of all sizes. It easily creates unique and tailored product imagery in seconds. The best part, it's totally free. As a visual-first platform, we know how important it is for a brand's products to stand out. In fact, we've seen that lifestyle images on average, drive a significantly higher click-through rate than simple product images, but creating eye-catching, high-quality creative can be expensive and resource-heavy. That makes it really hard for small businesses. With Creative Studio, businesses can generate scenes for their next campaign in a snap, no photo shoot required. Let's say you're launching a sunscreen product. Just give Creative Studio prompts like, sunscreen bottles surrounded by sand and palm trees and we'll generate scenes that look and feel like the content that inspires people today on Pinterest. Creative Studio is currently in early testing, but this is just the beginning. Our long-term vision is to dynamically personalize ads to each person's specific taste. Putting a couch in a scene that uniquely appeals to a mid-century modern design lover, preparing a brand's line of new tops with an outfit tailor-made for someone with an eye for bohemian style. We're uniquely positioned to offer industry-leading visualization tools, because Pinterest has an incredible sense of our audiences' tastes and preferences, more than anyone else, and we look forward to sharing it with you. We believe Pinterest is the only platform that supports people across the entire consumer journey. From that first magic moment, someone discovers a new brand or product to the moment they make decisions about what to try and what to buy. And we're ready to unleash even more value for our pinners and for our advertisers in the coming months. So stay tuned. Thanks, everyone, for joining, and have a great day. [Presentation]

Okay. For too long, the online world is focused on making buying things fast. And fast can be great. But if I want new shoes and just buy the first pair I find, there's no brand love or loyalty there. That's a transaction but not a relationship. On Pinterest, we want the final act of buying to be fast and easy too. But there's a whole journey of browsing, research and planning that has to happen first. That journey is called shopping. And it's different from buying. I know that sounds obvious, but the shopping experience has largely been ignored online. This, of course, is where Pinterest comes in. We're working to build the world's most inspirational taste-expanding and enjoyable place to shop online, and we better, because shopping is one of the primary reasons the majority of people say they come to Pinterest in the first place. People arrive here with an [indiscernible] a new outfit, a redesigned bedroom. In other words, if social media is like kicking back to watch a movie, Pinterest is like taking a trip to the mall. Our vision is to make everything you see on Pinterest shoppable. We're a visual-first platform, and that's what makes it more useful than a search engine. But the real magic of Pinterest is that it helps you make up your mind. Let's take a look at the typical shopping journey on Pinterest. I start with a vibe search like, galactic metallic style, good luck typing that into a search engine. That search leads to this jacket, just begging to be bought. With the jacket decided, I can swipe up to see even more outfit ideas. More like this is a really underrated feature on Pinterest, in my opinion, and you can use it to keep going as far down the shopping rabbit hole as you want. There's something else big happening here. And that's how important it is to see products in the context of other products when shopping. Pinterest helps you [indiscernible] your full vision together and shop entire looks and scenes. And if you don't like a pair of fancy [indiscernible] but love the shoes in the image, we'll help you find them or a pair just like them. Now, no outfit necessarily needs a hat. But once you go out to see me in one, Pinterest inspired us to add that little razzle-dazzle at the end. The entire shopping journey from discovery to decision to do happens on Pinterest. But as a brand, you can't be a part of that journey if you're not here. So if you're a retailer who has a set-up shop on Pinterest, you're missing out on growth. The absolute best way to get started is by uploading your product catalogs and tagging any shoppable products, so customers can shop what they see. We also offer e-commerce integrations to make that process even easier with Shopify, WooCommerce and new this year, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Adobe Commerce. By setting up shop, your latest inventory and pricing are all automatically updated in real time on Pinterest. The best part? Retailers who upload their catalogs are seeing up to a 30% increase in attributed checkouts, and that's before they even spend a dime on Pinterest. Once your catalog is uploaded, you then have access to a full suite of shopping ad solutions that can drive people directly to purchase. At Pinterest, we also know that helping you make a sale is only one part of the equation. You need to be able to measure that it happens so you can prove the impact of your campaigns. The best way to get visibility into sales that happen on Pinterest is by implementing our API for conversions, either directly or through one of our e-com partners. So in short, set up shop on Pinterest today so you can reach the customers who are already here looking for you and bring a little joy back to the online shopping experience. [Presentation]

Maybe the end of cookies as we know them. But of course, the data and privacy changes coming from our industry are much bigger than just that. A wave of global regulation and consumer protections are ushering us all towards a more signal-challenged world, which means that many of today's leading analytics approaches will simply no longer work. And neither will retargeting using third-party cookies. At Pinterest, we believe these privacy changes are ultimately good for our industry because they are ultimately better for people. But only 8% of advertisers, yes, that's 8%, say that they actually understand what the majority of these changes mean for their business. Well, change is coming fast. And now is the time to think about your audience strategy and measurement program differently. You don't have to do it alone, but there's something to know upfront. If you are hearing that there is a silver bullet to solve all your measurement challenges, approach it with skepticism. No singular source of tools is coming. The truth is that every source has its shortcomings, whether it's the latency in results, single-channel biases or misattribution problems. Instead of looking for a singular source of truth, the measurement system of truth, one that relies on a combination of measurement tools to understand what's working and what's not across your marketing efforts. When done correctly, see more accurate, granular and holistic results. Here's how to do that. Start with a focus on quality signals and ramp up on marketing strategies that don't rely on third-party identifiers. To be honest, cookies and the type of retargeting they enabled were never a perfect solution. Frankly, people don't like feeling like they're being followed around the Internet. On Pinterest, we have always had the advantage of our on-platform intent signals. That could be what people pin, what they search for or what they save to their boards. We offer multiple layers of interest and keyword-based targeting. And recent research from Accenture showed that when you combine both interest and keyword targeting, alongside your CRM [indiscernible] audiences on Pinterest, you can achieve the same or even better results than you would have running retargeting alone. I promise there's life after cookies. [Presentation]

Now that we've talked about quality signals, it's time to really nerd out on measurement. You can't measure what you can't see, and we know about half of advertisers say they don't have access to the data they need. That's a problem, because it means targeting and optimizing based on a less robust set of data, which leads to insufficient learnings that you then use to make more decisions and the cycle repeats, you're stuck in this loop simply because you're working off of incomplete data. So the task ahead is to break that cycle and fill those data gaps with the right combination of tools. We recommend implementing our Pinterest API for Conversions as a way to plug your blind spots. KaDeWe, the second largest department store in Europe, deployed the Pinterest API for Conversions, and saw 130% lift in attributed purchases and nearly a 60% improvement in their checkout CPI. This isn't the first time you're hearing about API for Conversions in this show and for good reason. It's one of the most important steps you can take to improve your results right now and we offer a number of third-party implementation options to make this even easier. However, we do recognize that Pinterest is not the only media channel you care about. That's why we also recommend having marketing mix models as a core part of your measurement system of truth. I know MMM is hardly new news. However, it's important to give it a fresh look now because there's been a lot of updates in this space, and there's opportunity to fine-tune those models even further with experimentation. We're talking more granular insights with aggregated data at the speed that matches their organization's needs. That's a sentence that's like poetry to me and trust me, the measurement view you'll have of your campaigns will be even more beautiful. I know each of us has our own comfort level with this topic, so here's a quick recap for building your measurement system of truth. First, focus on finding partners with quality first-party signals before you think about measuring anything, like Pinterest, then build a toolkit to cover your data gaps. At the very least, start with Pinterest API for Conversions. From there, establish that cross-channel view and get more granular, always on insights, with third-party marketing mix models, calibrating with platform-level experiments along the way. If you take away only one thing here, it's that measurement is not a one-off effort but an iterative learning process, so be ready to experiment and adopt a test-and-learn mindset across all the tools in your toolkit. Taking the time and focus to get this right now, we'll help you make even more informed decisions as the industry continues to change. We worked closely with Australian beauty retailer, MECCA, on their measurement system of truth, which included a range of elements like the Pinterest tag, conversion visibility solutions and a focus on brand measurement. With healthy conversion visibility, MECCA has been able to see more than 20x the return on ad spend for their performance campaigns earlier this year. Know that we'll meet you wherever you are in this journey and help you understand where Pinterest fits within your broader system. But as Philip said, it's important to get started now because the industry is changing fast. We're already looking to the future and building for where the industry is headed next. This year, we launched Clean Room partnerships together with LiveRamp in the U.S. We know not every brand can prioritize the resources for this technology just yet. But it's giving us a really exciting glimpse of what's possible. And we're excited about bringing this capability to more brands seeking better measurement and marketing outcomes. With Clean Rooms, it's possible to imagine a world where all your data, first party and third party can be accessed in one environment [indiscernible] of course, where you can seamlessly connect the dots across your entire system of truth and find more ways to collaborate between your analytics teams and partners. This is where our industry is headed. It's a world that I'm excited to see, and it will be here before we know it.

No matter where you are in your journey today, even if you feel behind, we'd love to help you build a plan. But we can't stress it enough. The time to start is now. It's time to ask the hard questions, bring your leadership teams along and reach out for support. We will work through it one step at a time, and we'll do it together. [Presentation]

Thanks, Heidi. I just wanted to say a few words before the show started here today. We wanted to showcase some new energy and momentum with this year's show, and it means so much to everyone at Pinterest that you're all here with us today. It's a tough time to be a marketer. The industry landscape, it's shifting, resources are tight, and it's harder than ever to get attention and to break through. That means we've got a big responsibility to deliver growth for our advertising partners. And I know the pressure our audience is feeling. And for that reason, I don't want a single dollar from our advertising partners that they cannot measure throughout the entire funnel. I don't want a single dollar that is not helping them to either meet or exceed their business goals. So we've got hard work to do every day to earn and keep their trust. And that's why we're investing in our most ambitious product road map ever for our advertisers this year, with aspirations to be the industry's leading full funnel solution. It's why we keep highlighting the importance of the API for Conversions. While also launching immersive new awareness formats, like Premiere Spotlight. And that's why I cannot overstate the excitement I feel and the momentum that we're seeing with our shopping solutions. One of the reasons I'm proud to work at Pinterest every day is because I believe this work matters. We're on a mission to prove out a different kind of business model than our peers, one that proves that it's possible to build a truly positive place online and deliver business growth at the exact same time. Our industry is certainly designed to make money and to sell products. But I like to believe our most fundamental goal is simply to make people's lives better, to make them easier, more fun, more fulfilling. And I know so many folks in the audience would say the exact same thing about their own brands and about the work that they're doing every day. So whether you're an advertiser that's been with us since the very beginning or a long-time skeptic, I hope our commitment and our optimism today is clear. I've been with the company for nearly a decade, literally since the beginning, and I can confidently say that there has never been a better time to partner with Pinterest than right now. There is so much opportunity ahead. So thanks again to all of you for being here, and thank you for your partnership. It really means so much. So thanks, everyone. [Presentation]

Thanks so much for joining us.