Pinterest rolls out new promotion tools for brands, including slideshow ads for catalogues, and adds seven more countries to its Verified Merchant Program
Context & Ripple Effects
This move is the next step in a shopping build-out Pinterest has been running for years: it made Catalogs generally available back in 2019 so merchants could upload their entire product range, and just months ago gave creators a way to tag products in Idea Pins for commissions. Today's slideshow ads turn those static catalogue uploads into ready-made ad creative, while the Verified Merchant Program's seven-country expansion extends trust signals beyond Pinterest's core US market.
The international angle echoes an old playbook — Pinterest took Promoted Pins abroad starting with the UK as far back as 2016 — but this time the export is a commerce program rather than plain ads, signaling that merchant verification is becoming the backbone of its pitch to brands.
First-order effects
- Brands that already upload catalogues get a new ad format essentially free of production cost — slideshow ads assembled from existing product imagery — lowering the barrier to advertising on the platform.
- Merchants in the seven newly added countries can now apply Verified Merchant Program status, gaining the shopping surface and credibility markers previously limited to earlier markets.
Second-order effects
- Creator monetization and brand promotion tools now reinforce each other on-platform: commissioned product tags in Idea Pins give brands more shoppable placements to buy into, tightening Pinterest's commerce loop against rivals courting the same social-shopping budgets.
- Competitors in visual discovery and social commerce face pressure to match verified-merchant trust programs in the newly covered countries, where Pinterest is first to formalize merchant credentials at scale.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — catalogue infrastructure in 2019, creator commissions in mid-2021, branded formats and geographic expansion now — Pinterest is structuring itself as a full-funnel commerce layer rather than an inspiration feed, with advertiser demand increasingly tied to how much of a merchant's inventory lives natively on the platform.
The trend: Pinterest is steadily converting its visual-discovery audience into a catalog-driven commerce platform, expanding both the ad formats brands can buy and the geographies where verified selling is possible.