Pinterest to extend ad sales efforts to financial services, travel, other verticals, after saying last Sept. it was focused on retail and consumer goods
Jack Marshall / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
Pinterest has been building toward this for over a year: it first brought ads into users' home feeds in early 2015, then raised at an $11B valuation for international expansion, and by January was defending its ad business — touting 5X year-over-year revenue growth even as parts of the ad industry criticized its efforts. Last September it answered those critics by narrowing its sales focus to retail and consumer goods.
Today's move reverses that narrowing: Pinterest is now sending its sales teams after financial services, travel, and other verticals. The bet is that the retail-first playbook proved the product works, and the next leg of growth requires selling beyond the category where it started.
First-order effects
- Financial services and travel marketers gain direct Pinterest sales support for the first time, after being effectively deprioritized when the company declared its retail-and-consumer-goods focus last September.
- Pinterest's own sales organization spreads thinner across more categories, trading depth in retail for a wider advertiser funnel.
Second-order effects
- A broader advertiser mix dilutes Pinterest's dependence on retail budgets — the very category where its growth claims drew skepticism from ad-industry critics earlier in the year.
- Verticals like travel and finance bring different creative and measurement needs, raising the stakes for the third-party measurement partners Pinterest would later formalize when it rolled out video ads with Moat and Nielsen.
Third-order effects
- If the vertical-expansion pattern holds, Pinterest positions itself as a general-purpose advertising platform rather than a shopping companion — a trajectory that points toward supplementing its own sales force with outside demand, as it eventually did with its multi-year strategic ads partnership with Amazon.
The trend: Visual platforms are graduating from single-category ad experiments to full-vertical advertising businesses, with category breadth preceding partnerships for demand at scale.