Pinterest launches promoted video ads in the U.S. and U.K.

Pinterest has begun showing promoted video ads across its visual search engine, allowing brands to leverage existing creative work done for offline media, such as television. The new ad format is similar to the Cinema Loop ads that companies like Flipboard are using — ads in which you’re shown a teaser in GIF format but view the full commercial after tapping to learn more.

Businesses with managed Pinterest accounts in the U.S. and U.K. are eligible for video ads, and the company has launched this format with five partners: BareMinerals, Behr Paint, Kate Spade New York, Lionsgate, and Purina.

“Pinterest’s mission is to build the world’s catalog of ideas, and one way to bring it to life is video,” shared Mike Bidgoli, a product manager for monetization who came by way of his startup’s acquisition in June. “Video is the number one ask from our partners and advertisers and…if you think about the trend of cord cutting, a lot of media budget is allocated to television, a market that’s shrinking. There’s a massive search for the next place for advertisers to deploy resources.”

With brands looking for the next logical place to advertise, Pinterest wants to become the lead contender for advertising budgets. The service isn’t putting any restrictions on videos — they can be square, vertical/portrait, or landscape format and can span any vertical, such as beauty, food, financial services, and entertainment.

Pinterest is using Cinema Loops, which will autoplay in your feed, but only to provide you with key frames of the full video. If you’re interested, tap to see the ad with sound enabled. Not only that, the site also allows advertisers to show related pins.

Videos can be any length, but Bidgoli revealed that in early tests, there was a higher propensity for people on Pinterest to watch longer videos. “People are on Pinterest to learn, discover, and do things, so there’s an opportunity for longer-form videos,” he said. This makes sense, as many people turn to Pinterest for guidance on how to cook, what to wear, how to change the oil on their car, topics that clips lasting mere seconds may not be able to cover.

Like Facebook, Snapchat, Google, and Twitter, Pinterest has become heavily invested in videos. It has seen the volume of video data saved increase 60 percent annually, and partners and advertisers have been asking for tools to leverage the format. There’s certainly incentive to appeal to brands, as 75 percent of the content on Pinterest comes from businesses.

In early tests, the company claimed that General Mills’ Old El Paso brand found that the promoted video ads were four times more memorable than non-video ads. “Our customers come to Pinterest with high intent, and the ability to show a recipe and our products through video is a unique opportunity to drive higher performance,” said Meredith Schaffner, General Mills’ marketing manager.

The launch of promoted video ads comes a couple of weeks after Pinterest announced plans to speed up video discovery for users. The upcoming changes include the launch of a native video player, something Bidgoli said will play an important role — it will no longer open up a player in another platform just to play the video. This technology has been carried over to the promoted side of the service.

Users will start to see promoted video ads when using Pinterest’s iOS and Android apps — 80 percent of all Pinterest users are on mobile — but the feature has not been made available for the desktop yet. Advertisers will need to have a managed account in order to purchase these ads.