Recently, Pinterest, a Social Media platform that builds itself on visual discovery, launched an upgrade that has Advertisers as its main target. This was done by unlocking more than 5,000 interests that advertisers can now target against using what the company is calling its “Taste Graph.” Pinterest’s nomenclature for its system to be able to figure out not only what users like, but also how what they like changes over time – such as topics that are suddenly interesting, and ideas that decay into irrelevance.
Social Media has grown rapidly away from what it used to be a decade ago. It has left the era of just connecting with friends (old and new ones), families and potential business partners in a supposed virtual community. It has eventfully become a convergence of many human activities ranging that make life continually flow even better than it used to be.
On this pedestal, many Social Media platforms have taken it upon themselves to introduce more interesting options on each of their platforms. From gamification to creating and monitoring events, and to a more important aspect, marketing cum advertising.
Recently, Pinterest, a Social Media platform that builds itself on visual discovery, launched an upgrade that has Advertisers as its main target. This was done by unlocking more than 5,000 interests that advertisers can now target against using what the company is calling its “Taste Graph.” Pinterest’s nomenclature for its system to be able to figure out not only what users like, but also how what they like changes over time – such as topics that are suddenly interesting, and ideas that decay into irrelevance.
Initially, Pinterest was built on the idea that you can come to the app, go through something you like, and with curiosity, dive down a rabbit hole. They have built an extensive suite tools internally to figure out which rabbit hole to divert users to, which now has gone beyond that to open up some of that metrical knowledge to advertisers. Just another way to join the big guys in the industry in the areas of Ads sets but entirely with a unique set of data based on its user behavior.
Talking on the Taste Graph, John Milinovich, Product Manager for the Taste Graph, said, “One of the biggest difference with the Taste Graph compared to what we were doing before was really diving into understanding the nuances of how we relate Pinners to Interests based on the recency and frequency of their engagement. We’re much smarter about how we decay interests from user’s taste profile so that we can better personalize their recommendations. So, if you haven’t pinned about your wedding in a while, you will stop seeing wedding content.”
While the year was still fresh, Pinterest said it would also bring its visual search technology to its ads as it continues to try to build a differentiated advertising product. The Taste Graph has been around for a while and has historically been used for organic content, Milinovich said. This will be an addition to Pinterest’s conscious tailing of users that are interested in products at specific moments in their lives.
All about using Taste Graph to improve their advertising products started in 2017, an attempts that would help advertisers access users with a much more specific set of interests. The better the targeting, the more likely a user is likely to engage with an ad – meaning the better ROI for both the advertiser and Pinterest.
Since the Social Media has come to rewrite the stories of awareness advertising conversion brought by mainstream media, which used to be unbalanced, Pinterest executives emphasize that their hope is to build an advertising business that not only touches at each point of their buying life cycle but demonstrate to brands that the ads they showed to them at the very beginning of their awareness led to a conversion. Such conversion may be delayed for months, but in the end, it was still a conversion, hence; the aim of marketing.
The company hopes that providing that attribution leads to a strong selling point to grab ad spend away from bigger, more reliable platforms by offering a unique user base.
