Having succeeded in making scrapbooking a Web craze, Pinterest Inc. now has a new goal: to reinvent online advertising. The four-year-old digital scrapbooking website is preparing to launch ad sales in the second quarter with a bold pitch. Rather than Web ads that urge people to "click here!" or "buy now!," Pinterest wants to make artful Web ads that people actually love.
New ad chief Joanne Bradford, 50 years old, said Pinterest's goal is to build ads that can themselves be fashioned into works of art—akin to ads for Absolut Vodka that a young person might tear from a magazine and stick on a wall.
Pinterest plans to start with a select group of marketers who will be the first to pay for so-called "promoted pins" on the site, said Chief Executive Ben Silbermann. Typically users "pin" or copy professional photographs from all over the Internet and post them to personal Pinterest pages. Early copies of Pinterest ads looked similar to other images posted to the site but with the label "promoted pins" on the bottom border.
Since it launched in 2010, Pinterest has built a following of 40 million users in the U.S., mostly women, according to eMarketer, who post images on the site of anything that interests them—from skiing to travel to kale recipes.
Investors love the company, reckoning that it's a place where marketing dollars will easily flow. They've already pegged Pinterest's value at $3.8 billion, even though the site has generated virtually no revenue to date.
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