Pinterest Expands Ad Options With New Video Format, Pricing

Social scrapbooking application Pinterest has introduced a host of changes to its advertising product, promoted pins. Users will now see mobile video ads in their feed, which will come to life as they scroll down the page and pause when they stop doing so. You can check out a demo here.

Under the hood, Pinterest’s advertising program is becoming more sophisticated.

In addition to animated posts, it’s introducing two more pricing options, giving brands the choice of paying for engagement (CPE) or by action (CPA). For example, with CPE fees, Pinterest* will only charge companies an advertising fee if a user clicks on their promoted pin. Under CPA, it only charges them if the promoted pin leads to an app install or purchase.

The new features and pricing will be overseen by Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s former head of product who moved over to run its money-making efforts. He knows the role well, having served as Facebook’s director of monetization from 2006 to 2010.

“[We want to] let any business of any size meet any objective they might have,” Kendall said. “By doing that we think we take the risk out of working with us.”

Pinterest has also built an in-house creative studio called the Pin Factory to run brands’ campaigns for them, creating the images and writing the descriptions for posts. It makes it easier and more mindless for an advertiser unfamiliar with Pinterest best practices to market on the application.

Before now, the social scrapbooking company moved slowly and cautiously when it came to promoted pins. It spent eight months perfecting the beta version with a limited number of partners before offering it to the world.

It’s years behind its older social siblings, Twitter and Facebook, but Pinterest is ready to build out its skeleton product to become a mature advertising platform.

* Pinterest executive Joanne Bradford is an independent board member of Re/code’s parent company Revere Digital, but has no involvement in our editorial process.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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