Rich Pins: Pinterest’s Marketing Play

Pinterest may be rewriting some of the new rules of online marketing. While advertising on the platform is still in its infancy versus competitive sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and companies need to figure out what works best for their organizations, Pinterest already has signed up some major fashion and retail brands in the year since it unveiled Rich Pins including Target, Gap, J. Crew and Nordstrom. The six-year-old platform is home to 50 billion pins that live on more than one billion boards, with two million people pinning product Rich Pins each day. According to industry experts, the discovery platform is a powerful referral tool, driving high percentages of traffic back to brands’ digital flagships — and both Promoted and Rich Pins appear to be accelerating this. Rich Pins, not to be confused with Promoted Pins — the platform’s mode of advertising that was introduced in beta testing last May — are actually free for businesses. They are just pins that contain detailed product information, from real-time pricing to availability and where to buy an item. But if a brand really wants to boost its reach on the site, it has to pay for Promoted Pins. After seven months in beta

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