Axios’ Sara Fischer in conversation with Pinterest’s Bill Ready

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah, so, you know, we think about on Pinterest instead of optimizing for time spent, optimizing for time well spent. And, you know, things that we are tuning for, you know, we've talked about tuning AI for positivity, we've also, you know, tuned for intention. You know, I think a lot of what has happened is that users have lost agency. You know, you're not in control of what you see anymore, it's what an algorithm thinks you should see. And if you ask a Gen Z user, which Gen Z is now more than 40% of our platform, our largest, fastest-growing demographic, and if you ask them why they come to Pinterest, you know, a couple of things they'll reliably say. The first is that they see it as an oasis away from the toxicity they experience elsewhere. And the other, the other is that they'll say, 'Well, Pinterest just gets me.' And so what's behind 'Pinterest just gets me'? Well, there's a lot of things I can talk about technically in terms of what we're doing with AI and all those things, but we're making a different choice with the AI that if you look across so many other platforms, it's the AI has been put in charge of what you see, and it's going to serve you what it thinks you'll look at the longest to maximize your view time, to maximize time spent. But one of the things that was my premise coming in as CEO three years ago was that if we gave users more agency, this whole issue of like, how does social media become toxic, the AI got put in charge of what you see long before we were having a public conversation about AI. What if we put the users back in charge of what they see and use the AI to tune more for what users said they wanted to see, again, not just the things that they looked at the longest, but that they said, 'Yeah, I like that, I want to see that again.' And when we did that, all of a sudden, much more positive content flowed to the top. And so I think there's both, you know, an element of, you know, clear personalization that happens from the curation on our platform, but there's also user agency in that. That, you know, I think a lot, there's been a lot of discussion about, you know, how, you know, Gen Z has become more anxious and depressed and all these things because of social media, and there's a lot that we're doing to invest in that. But I think Gen Z actually understands this better than anybody else. They know so much of social media isn't good for them, they just haven't had healthier alternatives. So as we're giving them healthier alternatives, they're choosing that. And so back to how do we reward our users, we actually reward them by letting them invest in themselves and giving them the ability to make a healthier choice, and then rewarding that healthier choice that when they come back, instead of just showing them more things that will keep them looking the longest, showing them things that like actually are additive to their life rather than being addictive. So these are things that I think is very authentic, and we're seeing it really cut through with, with, with Gen Z users especially.

Yeah, so it's, it's a great point, and maybe I'll start with sort of the, sort of where we are on this right now. Like, you know, I mentioned Gen Z is 40% plus of our platform. You know, Pinterest is where Gen Z goes to shop. So more than 60% of Gen Z will start their shopping journeys on Pinterest. Think of Pinterest as a first place to go shop. And I talked about some of the reasons for that, like respecting their agency, respecting their intention, that we're serving them things that are relevant to them, that they've clearly expressed an interest for. You know, but that sort of gets to your, your question of, well, how do you make it not feel commercial? Well, we focus a lot on how do you make ads great content. When are ads great content? It's when they're relevant and when they're useful. And so if I'm in an entertainment-based context, you know, and I'm trying to, you know, watch something for entertainment purposes, and you show me an ad, no matter how good that ad is, if it takes me away from the thing I'm trying to do, you started out on negative footing right from the beginning. However, if I've expressed an interest and I'm trying to do something, and you show me an ad that has a product that's going to help me do that, or that's really relevant to me and what I'm trying to do, trying to figure out like, what should I wear to an event at the beach? You know, what, what do you wear in the south of France in the summer? If you make me, I'm looking for that, and you make me a great recommendation, thank you. I don't care if that's an ad or organic, as long as it's relevant and useful and hopefully good creative, then that's going to be really great content. So in terms of like how we've made it so that Gen Z comes here to shop, it is, you know, we solve for actionability. Pinterest historically had sort of created visual search but hadn't fully solved for that, largely because it was missing the actionability. People would find a lot of inspiring images of what they wanted, but then they couldn't take action. And so we've solved the actionability by making it easy for them to go click and buy. But then in addition to that, we double down on relevancy and said, 'Okay, the ads have to be relevant content.' We've got amazing tools with GenAI that we can leverage off of the curation signal that we have, where there's lots of places that know all the things you buy, all the things in your closet, none of them have any idea how you would style those things in your closet into an outfit. What do people do on Pinterest? They're actually putting together outfits, designing rooms. So we learn people's style and taste. So our taste graph has grown by more than 70% the last two years, and we use that to make it so that when you come back to Pinterest, you know, and this sort of gets to what you're mentioning earlier, like how you reward, well, we're helping you along your journey. So when you come back, we're going to make a great recommendation based on your style and taste, but we can do that with less and less information from you. That, you know, if you've done a little bit of refining your taste, and maybe you started with just like, I don't know, the outfit I'm going to wear at the event. Maybe some of you all went through some of this, you know, as you're planning for this, for this trip. Okay, well, I know I want to, I know I want this handbag, but how do I put a whole outfit together around that handbag? I know that's the killer pair of shoes, how to put together the outfit around that killer pair of shoes. You can start with just that, and we'll bring you recommendations that are the intersection between how many, many other people styled those shoes, but which of them had tastes similar to you. So that when we make that recommendation back to why does Gen Z come here, Pinterest just gets me. That's how you get that emotion of like, Pinterest just gets me. We want it to be, you know, a shopping assistant that's as good as if, you know, or almost as good as if you were shopping with your best friend or your sister or your mom or your brother or, or whoever it, or a great stylist. That's what we want it to be, but it's self-driven. And I think that's a big part of it, that, that users are expecting more of that personalization, but also want to be more in charge of it. So they have agency in their driving instead of it happening to them.

It's a great question, and, and it's a place where there's a lot more that we're doing, and I think there's a lot more happening on Pinterest than what people realize. So, you know, I talked about how Pinterest is a place where people go to refine their taste and style. Well, that's where creators are going to refine their taste and style as well. So we hear from so many creators and influencers that they go work out what they're doing on Pinterest first before they go publish elsewhere. So we actually get insight into trends long before they're happening other places. Now, there's a lot more we need to do to make that easily accessible to others, and so that's one of the things that we're announcing here at Cannes is that we are, our Pinterest Trends tool, we've opened up a next, a next revision of that that makes it easier than ever to access those trends. But we're, we're both making it easier to access those trends, but also easier for those that are refining their taste, particularly major influencers and content creators, to go express that. So for example, just announced, Emma Chamberlain just announced a collaboration with Pinterest on her coffee and her, you know, first collab for us and for her on a new coffee flavor that is based on a Pinterest trend. It's a trend, so it's, is the new coffee flavor is sea salt caramel, and it's off of one of our, one of our trends that we see people curating. But one of the things Emma has talked about is that she, in fact, she said this in some of what she talked about with, with this launch, that she's not scrolling anymore. She's mostly off the internet, but where does she still go? Pinterest, because she's in charge of what she's doing. It's, you know, it's not doom scrolling, it's not things being pushed at her. She gets to work in, work on and refine her taste. And now we're making it easier than ever for her to not only publish more of that, but also for her to benefit from, oh, well, here's some things that are happening in sort of, you know, you know, food's a major category on our platform. So how do you take some of that and then she say, oh, okay, she's doing amazing things with her, with her coffee. Oh, well, how do you work that into a new collab between us? So there's things like that, that there's so much more happening on our platform with creators that's actually happening on Pinterest first before it gets published elsewhere, and we're going to do more to open that up. And there's, you know, just other great organic examples of, you know, amazing, you know, content creators and influencers have talked about. So Emma Chamberlain, of course, but folks like, you know, Lady Gaga or Megan Thee Stallion, you know, or Chappell Roan, that have all talked about how, and these aren't, you know, sponsorships, these are, they're talking about, you know, Pinterest is where I go to, you know, again, like what Gen Z would say, oh, I get to go invest in myself and figure out myself and figure out the things I'm interested in. And this is, you know, Gen Z will say this too, I get to invest in myself instead of myself, right? And they're sort of working out what they want. And, you know, all these creators, influencers, they're people too, and they're refining their taste on Pinterest too.

Oh, well, I'm, I'm a big sneakerhead.

Oh, well, see the, um, laceless.