Intent Is Everything. Pinterest Has More of It Than You Think
Caroline Orange-Northey is making the case for a platform the industry has been measuring wrong
Caroline Orange-Northey spent nine years at Amazon Ads. That is not a neutral starting point. Amazon built the performance advertising infrastructure that most of the industry still runs on: last-click attribution, conversion tracking, and direct response as the default measure of platform value. She understood it, sold it, and believed in it. Then she joined Pinterest.
Caroline is someone who came from the place that defined how advertising is measured. Her central argument, six months in her role as Managing Director, is that the measurement model is wrong.
“Not to be too provocative, but I think it’s not very modern to just look at last click, A lot of the value that platforms bring is reduced through that lens, but none more so than Pinterest.” - Caroline Orange-Northey
Eighty Billion Searches and an Unbranded Majority
The scale of Pinterest’s search activity catches most people off guard. The platform processes 80 billion searches a month, 96% of which are unbranded. Users are arriving with clear commercial intent but without a fixed brand allegiance. For a marketer, that is as close to an open goal as digital advertising gets.
“There’s some alchemy in there,” Orange-Northey says, “because they actually have the opportunity to form brand preference before it’s set.”
Gen Z now accounts for over half the platform’s audience, a demographic shift she describes as one of the bigger surprises since she joined. The platform she had associated with aspirational browsing, home interiors and wedding planning, is ageing down faster than its external reputation suggests.
FOBO and the Cart Abandonment Problem
One of the more useful frameworks Orange-Northey brings to the intent debate is what Pinterest internally calls FOBO: the fear of better options. Research from the University of Cambridge suggests humans make approximately 35,000 decisions a day. Simultaneously, 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before purchase.
Her argument: these are not separate phenomena.
“Consumers have a confidence problem. Pinterest quintessentially solves that: not with a tool, but the entire experience is curation. You’re literally whittling down your choices to ones that feel most like you, and then you can make a more confident purchase decision off the back of that.”
Caroline Orange-Northey, MD of Pinterest, UK & Ireland
The commercial intent on Pinterest, she argues, is structurally different from that of other platforms. “Attention is often fragmented, but intention is usually whole.” The problem is that the advertising industry has built a measurement model that can’t see exploratory intent at all.
The Measurement Gap
If that intent argument is compelling, the industry’s measurement infrastructure consistently works against it. Last-click attribution, still the dominant model for performance budgets, places all value on the final touchpoint before conversion. Pinterest, sitting upstream in the consideration phase, rarely gets the credit.
Orange-Northey cites an analysis suggesting that 95% of Pinterest’s impact is invisible to advertisers who look only at last-click data. Brands are almost certainly underinvesting in the platform while crediting other channels for sales that Pinterest helped generate.
The Omnilux case makes the point sharply. The beauty technology company switched from last-click to view-based attribution through Northbeam and saw a sevenfold increase in Pinterest-attributed conversions. The media spending had not changed. The measurement model had.
Visual Search at Scale
Visual search queries grew 44% year-on-year on Pinterest, a figure Orange-Northey uses to argue that brands need a fundamental rethink of how they present themselves: not a creative refresh, but a change in the underlying logic of their content approach.
“Brands need to think beyond keywords and think visuals first. The human brain processes an image 60,000 times faster than text.” - Caroline Orange-Northey
Her other instruction is to maintain creative standards throughout the funnel. Pinterest’s internal research suggests brands routinely drop creative quality between upper-funnel awareness and lower-funnel conversion, a habit Orange-Northey identifies as both an industry problem and a Pinterest-specific missed opportunity.
“There’s no reason to have these gorgeous upper funnel assets and then have reduced creative impact when you get to the lower funnel. Maintain standards and continue to leverage the value of brand equity all the way through.” - Caroline Orange-Northey
On the competitive question, whether Google Lens or TikTok’s visual discovery represents a threat, Orange-Northey is measured. Visual search has always been core to Pinterest in a way that it is not for either competitor. “It’s always been in the DNA,” she says, and that capability advantage is compounded by something harder to replicate: a decade of data about what people find visually compelling and what those signals reveal about taste.
The Taste Graph: Targeting Built on Behaviour, Not Identity
That data is what Pinterest calls the Taste Graph, and most advertisers misunderstand its unique value.
It is an algorithm built on 80 billion signals (searches, saves, clicks, image interactions) and continuously updated to track how individual tastes evolve over time. Someone who saved coastal interiors six months ago and is now pinning maximalist colour palettes is not the same person they were, and the Taste Graph moves with them.
In an industry still working through the operational consequences of cookie deprecation, that distinction matters. Most of the targeting infrastructure advertisers rely on runs on one of two things: third-party behavioural data, which is increasingly restricted, or declared identity signals, which are static and easy to game. The Taste Graph is built from first-party, real-time behavioural data generated by users actively engaged in discovery, precisely when purchase intent is most legible.
“I don’t believe AI search has a good handle on taste. The Taste Graph is gold dust.” - Caroline Orange-Northey
For a performance media buyer, the practical implication is that Pinterest’s targeting layer does not require third-party cookies, does not depend on users accurately self-declaring their interests, and updates continuously rather than sitting as a fixed audience segment. A campaign targeting homeowners in the market for a kitchen renovation does not need to rely on cookie-based retargeting if the Taste Graph already knows, from first-party signals, that a user has been actively curating kitchen content for three months.
The signal Orange-Northey singles out as particularly underappreciated is saves, including ad saves. When a user saves an ad, they are flagging commercial intent at a moment of active consideration. That signal feeds back into the Taste Graph, sharpening subsequent targeting. It is the kind of closed-loop feedback that performance marketers build elaborate workarounds to approximate on other platforms.
“What other platform would you save an ad?” she asks. In a cookieless targeting environment, that is a serious question.- Caroline Orange-Northey
Pinterest Performance+: The AI Layer That Runs on Top
The Taste Graph provides the intelligence. Pinterest Performance+, the AI-powered campaign management suite launched in Q2 2024, provides the infrastructure to act on it at scale.
Performance+ is not a single tool. It is an end-to-end campaign layer covering targeting, creative optimisation, bid management and outcome measurement, all underpinned by machine learning that draws on the Taste Graph’s behavioural data. The practical effect is that campaigns running through Performance+ can be set up in roughly half the time of standard Pinterest campaigns, while consistently delivering stronger results.
Performance+ now carries 30% of Pinterest campaigns. The headline performance figure is a 24% higher conversion lift versus standard campaigns, and Orange-Northey is direct about the scepticism that number attracts.
“We haven’t just plucked out one example. We see it consistently. If anybody’s sceptical, I always ask them to lean in and test and learn.”
Caroline Orange-Northey
The case studies bear that out. Celebrity Cruises ran an always-on campaign using Performance+ creative refresh, persona-interest targeting, and keyword trending. It beat its cost-per-click target by 14% and doubled its close-up rate relative to the travel benchmark.
A Levi’s campaign ran Performance+ targeting against video completion and trend objectives, beating the benchmark by 27.4% on completion and lifting Pin awareness 2.6 points.
Levi’s has since extended the partnership into the Summer 2026 Trend Report, becoming the first UK brand to co-launch a trend report with Pinterest. The timing reflects what the platform is seeing in search: “denim shorts outfits women” is up 430% year on year, with “micro denim shorts outfits” (+453%) and “denim jorts outfit” (+330%) climbing alongside it. Levi’s has built its most comprehensive shorts range to date around that signal, anchored by the 501® Original Short and the longer, looser Baggy Dad Jort, and paired the launch with an “Off-Duty Summer Denim” edit and a Premiere Spotlight on Search.
What Performance+ is doing, in structural terms, is closing the gap between the quality of Pinterest’s underlying targeting data and advertisers’ ability to use it. The Taste Graph has existed in some form since the platform’s early years; the question was always whether the campaign tools were sophisticated enough to translate that data advantage into measurable outcomes. That translation layer is now in place, which is what makes the current period commercially significant for advertisers who have historically treated Pinterest as a supporting channel rather than a primary one.
The Levi’s Test
The toxicity debate around social media is a live commercial consideration for any platform with a large Gen Z audience. Orange-Northey’s position is that Pinterest doesn’t meaningfully belong in that category: users build boards for themselves, not for an audience, and the social performance mechanics that drive so much of the documented harm in adolescent social media use are largely absent.
The most compelling endorsement of that positioning did not come from a Pinterest press release. It came from a Levi’s 501 Day video in which Emma Chamberlain, one of the most commercially influential Gen Z voices online and with an audience in the tens of millions, sits down with Hailey Bieber over Chamberlain Coffee and, at around the four-minute mark, they start talking about Pinterest.
There’s no Pinterest representative in the room. They’re in a Levi’s studio, on a Levi’s production, promoting Levi’s jeans. What follows is an unscripted exchange about how obsessed they both are with Pinterest: how it is the happiest corner of the internet, a place apart from the noise and performance anxiety of every other platform they use. No prompting, no brand brief, no talking points.
“When you hear someone else talk about their experience of joy, ‘is it just me who’s obsessed with Pinterest, it’s the happiest corner of the internet?’ and Emma Chamberlain says, ‘It’s me as well’. I just thought that was so powerful.”
Caroline Orange-Northey
Chamberlain and Bieber are two of the most commercially astute Gen Z voices online, people who have built careers understanding what content works, on which platform, for which audience. They know exactly what they are saying and where. And what they choose to say, in a Levi’s studio, is how much they enjoy using Pinterest.
That is not something money buys. It is something a platform earns over the years.
Emma Chamberlin and Hailey Bieber discuss Pinterest (4 minutes 30 into the interview)
The Gap Worth Closing
Pinterest is doing more for advertisers than its share of their media plans suggests. The Taste Graph provides first-party targeting infrastructure that most of the industry is still trying to build from scratch. Performance+ gives advertisers the operational tools to act on it. The measurement problem is real but solvable, as Omnilux demonstrated, and brands that have solved it consistently find the channel under credited in their attribution models.
The headline thesis is worth restating. The industry is measuring the wrong thing. Last-click attribution was never built to capture the contribution of platforms upstream of conversion, and Pinterest is the clearest case in point. Brands still running performance budgets on a last-click basis are not making rational choices about Pinterest. They’re making choices; a broken measurement model is making it for them.
Orange-Northey’s task is to make that case to an industry that has spent years treating Pinterest as a nice-to-have. She has the data, the case studies, and the experience to do it. She also now has Emma Chamberlain and Hailey Bieber.
Pinterest will be at Cannes Lions Festival this year from 22nd - 25th June. If you are attending and want to meet the Pinterest team register at Pinterest Cannes.
