How Pinterest Could Shake Up Connected TV

No, really.

From the I Did Not See That One Coming Department came news last week that the ad tech startup tvScientific - which aspires to make TV advertising as easy to buy and track as it is to run ads on Instagram - is being acquired by - Pinterest?

What in the name of tasteful-yet-elegant decor is going on here?

If you told me that say The Trade Desk, which is on the buy side and is leaning heavily into connected TV ads, or Comcast, which is trying to help foster a market for small to mid-sized brands on TV, I’d have nodded, and thought - that makes sense.

But Pinterest?

Let’s think this through:

• Pinterest is a very large social platform, and a serious ad player - but not a company that anyone accuses of being part of the Duopoly/Triopoly

• Pinterest sells ads, and is not on the buy side

• Pinterest hasn’t bought much ad tech

• Pinterest does have a video ad product, but is a virtual non-factor in TV advertising

So what gives here?

Pinterest has long felt like an in-betweener in digital media. On the one hand, the platform is all about things people want to buy, want to do, or might someday want to buy and do. So it’s seemingly loaded with intent signals for brands in travel, food, home decor, etc.

Yet on the other hand, it’s not a place most people actually execute purchases. As much as Pinterest may have tried (as have other social players - like Meta many times) to become fulfillment platforms, that’s Amazon, Walmart and Target’s domain.

So while it feels like Pinterest should be killing it in retail media, per se, that hasn’t really happened. That doesn’t mean that Pinterest doesn’t have a lot going for it:

• Q3 revenue jumped 17% year over year to $1,049 million

• Global monthly uniques climbed 12% year over year to 600 million

• It’s got a healthy ecosystem of unique influencers

So how does this connect to CTV?

• As I understand it, Pinterest’s strength has been in search, product feeds and social ads - which are very analytically-driven advertisers, but not the kinds of folks that control TV spending.

• That said, could Pinterest be a way to funnel more small-to-mid-sized brands who have never done TV to TV ads? I’m not sure. Many Pinterest advertisers - like a Samsung or Ikea - may not need much help here.

• According to buyers I’ve talked to, if there’s an area that Pinterest has struggled, it’s direct attribution.

• However, if there’s a way to take Pinterest’s strong intent signals, and its user IDs, and connect that to specific CTV inventory (either the right programming and/or right households), that could be a major win. “It’s showing that Pinterest is looking to broaden not only the ad formats they play in, but how they measure those formats to prove out value,” said Jack Johnston, Senior Innovation & Growth Director at Tinuiti. “We’ve been seeing LinkedIn try to make similar pushes into the CTV space as well over the last year.”

• Right, but if Pinterest struggles with direct attribution, so does TV in general. So how does the combination work? Well, this is where tvScientific’s tech comes in, say buyers. The startup is able to connect ad impression on TV to purchases made on people’s phones, for instance.

• A lot of connections have to be made here for all this to work. But if Pinterest can connect product searches to TV ads to mobile purchases, and so on - well, it could even make Amazon a tad bit nervous. Maybe. “For advertisers, this means more inventory for performance campaigns with the same high-intent audiences they would get from traditional platform buys, and increased harmony across campaign messaging in different formats,” said Johnston. “The challenge will be getting advertisers to rethink how they allocate budgets so that CTV comes as incremental investment rather than spreading existing budgets too thin.”

• Could Pinterest even help jump-start shoppable TV ads? It’s not out of the question.

There are a lot of moving parts here. For now, Pinterest says it plans to keep tvScientific running independently. But you’d have to think that deals like this are made to unlock synergies.

Because if the Pinterest/tvScientific combo could pull all this off - that is, connecting users and purchases that are driven on the Pinterest platform to CTV ads, and vice versa, it could help bridge the gap between brand and performance in television.

As one source put it, if Pinterest could emerge a comprehensive solution for search, social, and CTV performance advertising - well, there’s not a lot of other companies that can make such a claim.