Pinterest emphasises youth appeal in new global campaign

Pinterest is seeking to remind consumers that it is a platform for young people in its latest brand campaign.

The light-hearted campaign, created by Pinterest’s House of Creative team, aims to show how the platform turns the journey of self-discovery into an adventure.

Two short films utilised physical props and sets to highlight Pinterest’s message that the platform is about action in the real world, not the digital one.

“Find Your Aesthetics” focuses on how Gen Z use Pinterest to curate their tastes and, in turn, their identity, while “Whatever You’re Into” is a homage to the social media phenomenon of cats in (knitted) hats.

The campaign will run in the UK and the US, across TV, streaming, social media, digital, programmatic and cinema.

Analysis: Not just for mums

In an interview with The Media Leader last year, Milka Privodanova, Pinterest’s EMEA CEO, described two myths that the company was keen to dispel.

First, the idea that Pinterest is “for mums only”. The latest brand activity would suggest that this is very much top of the agenda for the platform.

“40% of our audience is Gen Z,” she said. “And we see these incredibly wide use cases of the platform. So people are using it for planning their financial future all the way to planning a dream trip. So it’s a really wide range of use cases.”

The second point Privodanova was keen to stress was that Pinterest is a “performance platform” that can “deliver incredible results”.

To this end, Pinterest has recently hired Beth Horn from Spotify to lead its sales strategy and execution in the UK.

Two myths Pinterest is keen to slay

Place of discovery

In its news announcing the campaign, Pinterest’s vice-president of global creative, Xanthe Wells, highlighted the platform as a place “where people are free to discover and shape their own unique identities, then make them real”. She added: “That extends beyond searching and saving, and into shopping.”

This comparison between digital life and real life, along with the reluctance to call itself “social media”, bears resemblance to Snap, which has been on a similar communications journey.

In a campaign launched earlier this year, Snapchat aimed to position itself as “a place where you could be real”.

Social media companies don’t want to be ‘social media’ any more