Pinterest’s Connected TV Play: The New Advertising Frontier Escaping Big Tech’s Grasp

Pinterest occupied a peculiar middle position in the digital advertising industry for many years. Too quiet to frighten anyone, but big enough to matter. Both the duopoly discussion and the retail media discussion didn’t really touch on it. It was there, complete with recipe pins, mood boards, and an oddly devoted following of people organizing second marriages and kitchen renovations. Thus, the response to the December announcement that Pinterest was acquiring tvScientific, a connected TV ad-tech company that most industry insiders could hardly identify, was one of near confusion. It would have made sense for the Trade Desk to purchase it. Yes, Comcast. Pinterest? It took a minute for that one.

Then April came, and the image began to take shape. With the launch of tvScientific by Pinterest, the company gave advertisers running ads on streaming services and smart TVs access to its first-party audience data. The wedding dress searches, patio furniture saves, and unfinished nursery boards that Pinterest has been secretly hoarding for more than ten years can now follow a viewer onto the living room screen for the first time. Although it’s a minor technical change disguised as a press release, the implications go beyond what the wording implies.

This move seems to indicate that Pinterest has finally discovered what it truly possesses. Not purchases—Amazon and Walmart have that locked down—but the planning layer, which comes right before a purchase. Pinterest is not where people go to make purchases. They go there to daydream. Furthermore, it turns out that imagination leaves a richer trail than the majority of advertising platforms have been able to record. According to the company, there are more than 80 billion searches per month, the majority of which are about things that haven’t happened yet. a makeover. A journey. A pair of boots for a season that will begin in six weeks.

The connected TV is experiencing a loud moment of its own. In the US, CTV ad spending reached $32.45 billion last year and is expected to surpass linear TV by $45 billion by 2028. Every ad-tech company that has a pulse is attempting to establish itself there. The angle of Pinterest’s entry—selling intent rather than inventory—makes it intriguing. Advertisers can target households that have raised a hand in some way by piping Pinterest’s signals into tvScientific’s optimization engine. According to Pinterest’s own pitch statistics, the combination results in a 65% increase in sales and a 27% improvement in outcomes per $100 spent. The numbers are preliminary. Additionally, an analyst would want to see an audit of these figures.

The company frequently cites LG as a test case, citing a 24% increase in net new customers and a 73% increase in unique households reached. Even though one example doesn’t create a market, those are actual results for a real brand. The more difficult question is whether larger advertisers will view CTV through Pinterest as additional funding or merely reorganized expenditures. The former is crucial to the entire pitch. This exact tension—that media buyers prefer to transfer money rather than find new pockets of it—was highlighted by Mike Shields, who writes about ad tech with the dry skepticism the industry deserves.

It’s difficult not to interpret this as Pinterest attempting to evade Meta and Google by moving to a location that neither of them fully owns. Social media and search are tightly controlled by the duopoly, which is occasionally a triopoly if you include Amazon. The streaming screen is more open, more disputed, and more fractured. Pinterest’s chief business officer, Lee Brown, has described the company as reaching customers at every step of the purchasing process, both on and off Pinterest, from discovery to checkout. The new thing is the “off” part. TVScientific opened that door. It’s still worthwhile to observe whether or not advertisers use it in any significant quantity.