Pinterest has initiated a new alpha test aimed at a new advertising product. The new product called “Premiere Spotlight,” allows brands to reach consumers from a more prominent position within the mobile app.
Advertisers will gain access to a premium placement for 24 hours on the Pinterest app’s search bar. With this, brands will be able to reach more people on Pinterest with one of the app’s main features; including the ability to search for pins, inspiration and ideas.
The new ad format can be located in the app’s most recent version. Already, you can see Kohl’s recent ad where the company is advertising women’s spring apparel.
The short video that plays overlaid by text in the ad is not the only attraction though, there is also a button that takes you to Kohl’s website. The site then opens within the Pinterest app, and not as a separate tab. Users can from there browse the retailer’s product suggestions, search for other items, add items to their cart and check out; the same way they could when visiting the Kohl’s official website directly.
With Premiere Spotlight, advertisers will be able to capture these new customers including those who may not have in the past seen their ads if they were never part of the targeted audience.
Advertisers will have prime positions for 24 hours with the new Pinterest ad format. That is not all, the ads will be engaging, and will be activated in-stream.
The new format has the capacity to be engaging, which will no doubt delight big brands. In terms of affordability, it remains to be seen if smaller brands will be able to afford the new Pinterest Premiere Spotlight ads format, though the cost has not yet been officially announced by the company.
Last month, Pinterest announced in its latest earnings call that it now records 450 million monthly active users globally. This represents an increase of 4 percent year-on-year. Though, Pinterest’s user base in both the US and Canada remained at 95 million, the company’s main growth came from other regions.
Meanwhile, Pinterest has announced that it plans to focus on making video shoppable. This, the company plans to make its focal point this year and even beyond.
“Over the long term, we also want to make every pin shoppable. To that end, we’re making video content on Pinterest more actionable using the same playbook we applied to static images. Over the course of this year, we’ll be deploying our computer vision technology across our video corpus to find products and videos and make them shoppable,” the company’s CEO Bill Ready said during the earnings call.
