You know that the tides of retargeting have changed when Pinterest introduces the ability to leverage CRM data in paid media. That’s certainly not a dig on Pinterest, but another assurance that, in just a few years, audience-based media buying will have completely changed how we think about advertising and marketing as a whole.
The news has a few particularly enthusiastic Pinterest fans on PMG’s social team stoked to start expanding their programs, and rightfully so, but I suspect that this could turn out to be a much bigger deal to retail and travel brands than our industry has let on in the weeks since the announcement. Pinterest seems to have done a lot of things right the first time around with this technology. And while Pinterest doesn’t have the same scale as their competitors–about 100m monthly average users, 1/3 the reach of Twitter–they have consumer intent on their side.
Here’s what I like about the Pinterest audience stack:
- Transparent match rates
- Secure uploads that can handle multiple hash formats (I recommend SHA256, but they’ll also take MD5)
- Pinterest deletes the hashed PII after matching it to their users
- If you don’t have a complete email dataset, you could also upload mobile IDs
- Smaller minimum audience size of 100 matched users
- Lookalike matches to scale up your top-tier CRM segments
- The ability to layer Pinterest behavioral data over first-party audience segments (Take note, Google)
With all of this in mind, we have Pinterest at the top of our list of partners that we’re looking to integrate with PMG’s Audience Management Platform. Over the next several weeks, we’ll be exploring the Pinterest API and testing capabilities to see how Pinterest can become a larger part of our clients’ media portfolios. Stay tuned!