A few months ago I put together a board on Pinterest with cycling jerseys that I thought were interesting. Relaxed, with no intention of shopping that day. Just keeping what I liked.

I ended up falling in love with one. The pin took me straight to the store. She was Spanish. The price of shipping to Costa Rica was absurd.

I bought it anyway.

That's Pinterest working at its best. A platform that turned someone who was just “saving ideas” into a customer who paid for international shipping, because the level of desire that built that discovery process was stronger than any logical friction.

From a marketing standpoint, that's exactly what companies aren't knowing how to take advantage of.

And it's no accident. We understand this because we experience it from the inside, not only as strategists, but as active users of the platform. Apartment boards, cycling boards, tennis boards and outfits for Reus. Pinterest is part of how we make buying decisions without even realizing that we're in that process.

That's why, when a company hires us to develop their digital strategy, Pinterest almost always comes up in the conversation. And we almost always encounter the same resistance.

The myth that is costing your business real opportunities

“Pinterest is for women planning weddings.”

It's probably the phrase we've heard the most times when proposing Pinterest as a strategic channel. And it's also the reason why those customers' competitors, the few who do use it well, are capturing audiences with buying intent while they continue to debate whether it's worth it.

The numbers say otherwise.

35% of active Pinterest users are men, and that segment is the fastest growing segment on the platform. The categories with the highest search volume include technology, sports, personal finance, dining and home. And the most important fact: 85% of weekly users have made a purchase based on something they saw on Pinterest.

It's not the wedding platform. It's the platform where people decide what they're going to buy before they know for sure.

How does this look in practice?

Today we're implementing a content strategy on Pinterest for Deep Sea, a seafood company in Costa Rica.

The principle is simple: people looking for how to cook seafood already have the intention. They just need someone to show them the right path, and that path will lead them to the product.

We create visual recipe content, optimized for search within Pinterest, that connects directly to the Deep Sea website. We're not interrupting anyone. We're showing up exactly when someone is looking for what they're selling.

It's the difference between pursuing customers and attracting them.

We have applied this same model before with other clients in consumer categories, and the results are consistent: more qualified traffic, longer time on page, and a shorter purchase cycle because the user comes to the website with the decision almost taken.

Pinterest does the grading work before the user reaches you.

Why OpenAI wants to buy Pinterest, and what does that say for the future of marketing

In January 2026, The Information published that OpenAI would be considering acquiring Pinterest. Not to have another social network. But to have access to something much more valuable: real purchase intent data, generated by real people, in real time.

OpenAI has a huge disadvantage compared to Meta, Google and XAI: it doesn't have its own network from which to extract signals of human behavior. It depends on third-party data, costly agreements with media such as News Corp or Condé Nast, and content alliances such as the one it recently signed with Disney for Sora.

That is not sustainable in the long term.

Pinterest, on the other hand, has something that very few platforms have: 600 million monthly active users who arrive with a clear intention. They don't come to see what their friends are doing. They don't come to entertain themselves aimlessly. They come to look for ideas, to plan purchases, to discover products. And they do so actively, visually, and with a purchasing disposition that no other social network can replicate.

That's exactly what OpenAI needs to turn ChatGPT into a real shopping tool.

Pinterest is not a social network. It's a search engine with built-in purchase intent.

This distinction changes everything from a strategic point of view.

When someone searches for “minimalist living room with earth tones” on Pinterest, they're not exploring out of curiosity. He's planning. You are weeks or months away from making a purchase decision. And that discovery process that occurs on Pinterest, before it reaches Google or any e-commerce, is invisible to most brands.

There is the opportunity.

According to Pinterest's own data, 97% of searches on the platform don't include the name of any brand. This means that the user arrives open, without pre-established loyalty, willing to discover. For a company that knows how to position itself well, that's a conversion window that doesn't exist on any other channel.

Why this matters now and not later

If the acquisition of OpenAI goes through, Pinterest's perceived value as a marketing platform will scale significantly. Brands that are already positioned when that happens will have an enormous advantage over those that try to enter later.

But beyond the speculation, there is something concrete that is already happening: Pinterest is evolving towards a shopping model integrated with artificial intelligence. It already has visual search tools, product catalogs, collection announcements, and direct purchase features. And all of that is getting better.

The brands that start working on Pinterest today, with a real strategy, will be the ones that are best positioned in the new discovery and buying ecosystem that is being built right now.

The time isn't when everyone is talking about Pinterest. It's now, when hardly anyone takes it seriously.

I know this because I paid for that shipment from Spain. And besides, I have no regrets:)

Sources: Social Media Today / The Information / Pinterest Q3 2025 Earnings

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