• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 21, 2024

Pinterest’s latest ad campaign running on social-media platforms such as LinkedIn explains how advertisers can easily turn its nearly half a billion people who search monthly for things into buyers.

The ad campaign, titled The P is for Performance, recreates scenes from action-based movies such as "Indiana Jones" using an old-school, Alfred Hitchcock rear projection style of filmmaking.  

“It’s a literal takedown of doing something high-performance,” said Xanthe Wells, vice president of global creative at Pinterest, who joined the company in 2022, and then built its internal creative team, similar to the way she built Google’s team.

Directed by Tim Godsall and supported by voice actor Corey Burton, the four creatives feature two over-the-top heroines dodging dangers while discussing how advertisers crave a performance-based platform that can increase conversion rates and traffic.

The spots titled "Car Chase," "Snowmobile," "Train" and "Volcano" will run through April 30 across paid social, search, programmatic and trade publication channels in the U.S., U.K., and AU before entering other markets worldwide later this year.

One spot takes a cue from an Indiana Jones film, where a woman wearing a classic fedora asks another who squats and balances beside on top of a moving train: “My dear, do you think those three tunnels are a metaphor for the way marketers feel beholden to a duopoly when it comes to lower-funnel ad spend?”

When Wells arrived at Pinterest, she set the same goal as when she worked at Google -- to establish an internal creative team. “We named it The House of Creative," she said. "Now we do nearly all our work internally without agencies.”

Pinterest does work with agencies Amplify and Mint, but for the most time the internal team conceptualizes and creates the major campaigns.

Performance products emphasized in the campaign include mobile deep links that allow merchants to direct people to a specific page on their app, and direct links that take consumers to an advertiser's product page in one click.

It also highlights an API for conversions that allows advertisers to send conversions to Pinterest via a secure server-to-server connection, and shopping ads to help brands engage with their customers.

B2B is one audience, but Gen Z is another. Wells said in April that the company will sponsor the Coachella Music Festival to reach a different type of audience.

Gen Z is Pinterest’s fastest-growing audience, with a growth rate of 20% year-over-year (YoY) compared with 8% of its user base.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people head to Coachella not just to listen to music, but also to express themselves. Many come to Pinterest to plan for that reveal. Last year, Pinterest searches for “Coachella outfit inspo” increased by 1,100% compared with the previous year.