00:10:00 · Sandy Diao
[00:10:00] S0: Yeah. So going back actually to the tickets that I was responding to, one of my biggest insights there was that the persona or the profile of the user writing in oftentimes wasn't a consumer. Right? We have this, again, massive social media app, and and we started to realize, and I started to see through the questions that people were asking, that these were actually marketers inside of small and medium sized businesses, oftentimes even enterprises. Sometimes you have really big enterprise logos writing in, and they have received the exact same SLAs or service level agreements as the consumers were receiving. Their questions were things like, you know, I want my pin to be seen by more people, or why is this pin only getting one view versus this one getting, you know, hundreds of views? So we started to realize that there were actually businesses with business use cases on the platform, which actually led to one of our biggest growth experiments. This experiment actually still lives on the Pinterest site today. When you create an account, it actually asks you, are you a regular user, or are you a business? And if you are a business, you get to the separate sign up flow where you can create a business profile, forking you and leading you into an entirely separate business experience. It's all about how you can promote your content on the Pinterest platform. So that insight from the ticket basically showed us that we needed to carve out a distinct experience for businesses, a separate onboarding flow that taught businesses how to market their content on the platform. And that actually eventually led into us building an advertising platform, one of the greatest tools that a marketing team or a business can get access to in order to further propagate their content on the Pinterest platform. So, you know, that's actually how that organically came about. And once that became true, we were able to then have distinct product marketing teams that supported the consumer side and the business side.
00:11:45 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:11:45] S1: And from, like, an insider's perspective, if typically, like, your role whenever you're in the growth team, I'm assuming that you have KPIs, and if... And your goal is essentially to generate, like, more revenue. So to generate more revenue, like, the the easy thing to say would be to just sell more ads. But at the same time, in order for you to sell more ads, you need to kind of preserve the quality and the experience of the platform so users are not, like, just flush with so many ads in their face. So how exactly do you balance, you know, like, the keeping a high quality product and at the same time, increasing the revenue?
00:12:29 · Sandy Diao
[00:12:29] S0: It's a great question. And I think this is true for Pinterest and many of the social content platforms out there, which is that oftentimes the advertiser's objective and the end user who's browsing the platform, getting the product for free, they have very aligned interests, which is that they wanna find stuff that they're generally interested in. One of the challenges we ran into in solving this problem at Pinterest early on is that Pinterest was... The the reason that somebody used Pinterest is a lot more for that early discovery consideration phase, a lot less for, I'm on Pinterest because I wanna click a link and make a purchase in a transaction. And so a lot of our early advertising experimentation was around figuring out how we can reach users in the right levels of intent. Right? And so at least early on, a lot of the experiments that we ran, if you ran a self-service ad and you wanted to conversion optimize it, well, it was tricky because you didn't have a ton of users who were actively clicking pins and pulling out their credit cards ready to make a purchase. It wasn't just... It wasn't an inherent behavior. Instead, there were a lot more people who wanted to save a collection of different inspiration and images, and an advertiser's goal would be, how do I increase chances that a consumer interacts with my brand or becomes aware that my brand is, you know, part of the landscape of different options out there? So categories that performed really well, like fashion, food, other types of consumer brands, but a lot less so, you know, a lot more sort of niche products, tech products, and so on and so forth. So it was really challenging to figure out how we could set up the platform in a way where all of the goals of the advertisers and the consumers viewing the platform would be balanced, and, you know, essentially monetizing that delicate balance and ecosystem. So, you know, we started out by actually experimenting with different types of ad platforms. One of them was actually more insertion order based, meaning, say, a brand wants to reach 10,000,000 people. Depending on the feeds and content and and topics that are relevant for that brand, we would just guarantee placements, you know, every x number of pins, and you would just essentially buy a package of impressions.
00:14:37 · Sandy Diao, Guillaume Moubeche
And then we eventually shifted to more of that, you know, CPC click based model, self-service model, insertions based on dynamic, second price bids, the typical model that we're all familiar with with, you know, social media advertising. So it wasn't an obvious answer, and it wasn't easy to get that balance. But I think the things that mattered along the way were making sure that those advertising outcomes existed for the advertiser and that the consumer engagement wasn't affected. So you had to track metrics across both sides. [00:15:08] S1: And you mentioned, like, two very interesting things. Like, one, you know, that some advertising would work better than others, which means that because you want your users to stay as long as possible on the platform and come back, You also need to, you know, as you said, you know, like provide value with ads that, you know, they would like or search for in any other environment. And you also mentioned that you helped eventually, like, sales team run outbound campaigns. Did you essentially, like, whenever you think about your outbound at the time with the information you have, do you look at all the kind of ads that are working extremely well on the platform in order to segment your campaigns and run the outreach to this kind of companies? So essentially, you know that you're gonna have companies who will get success on the platform, or is it very broad and you just make it per industry?
00:16:06 · Sandy Diao
[00:16:06] S0: Yeah. It's a great question. So I would actually share this. Our outbound worked with two different segments. And I think the first segment is unique to us because at the time, Pinterest owned distribution, in the sense that outbound was actually a house channel, meaning that we had this list of consumers that were already somewhat prospected in the sense that if you were a business, you know, you either sign up for a business account and or you maybe sign up for a consumer account because, you know, you made a mistake or you signed up too early, and then you have a website listed, and you have, you know, a lot of repin content. Right? So there's a lot of prospecting we can do within our within our own database. So that was more like product led sales. Right? And that one was a little bit more straightforward. We own first party signals around who was actually performing well, and we can enrich that with information. At the time, the more traditional way of enriching is you buy lists and you buy data, and you enrich it a little bit manually, although there's some, you know, ways of coding that in and automating it. But you could get things like, what is their total marketing budget? Or, you know, the things of that sort that kinda give you more signal. The other type of outbound that we did was realizing that social media advertising, especially for that discovery stage, the brands out there, think about, like, you know, the Coca-Cola of the world or the Burt's Bees, maybe products and categories that are more of a fit for Pinterest. They were actually spending on other social platforms, maybe doing the same thing that they would be doing on Pinterest. So like Facebook and Twitter at the time. So one of the things that we did was we actually took a list of some of those top target accounts, and we would actually look at the source code on their sites to see if they had a Facebook pixel at the time, to see if they had spend allocated on those platforms. And then we would add that as an additional high intent layer of signal to say, let's also reach out to these individuals and have our sales team reach out to them. So it was a combination of that product led sales as well as that outbound based on people who are actually spending money on other competitive platforms.
00:18:02 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:18:02] S1: Nice. Super interesting. I think... I'm not sure if you wrote this or if you said this in an interview, but it was... You you said that you were data inspired and not data driven. Can you elaborate on this?