In the video, Seth Matlins interviews Andrea Millard, the global Chief Marketing Communications Officer at Pinterest, exploring her broad role and responsibilities at the company. Andrea oversees teams across multiple functions, including marketing, communications, product design, and go-to-market strategies, emphasizing the importance of emotional well-being for users and long-term business growth. The discussion delves into the intricacies of being a CMO, focusing on the challenges of making decisions with incomplete data, the emotional vulnerabilities associated with the position, and the need for CMOs to be like CEOs of their functions.

The dialogue addresses the tensions between CMOs and their executive colleagues, the role emotion plays in consumer decisions, and the importance of aligning marketing and business goals. Andrea highlights the evolution of marketing from a final branding step to an integral part of product innovation, emphasizing the need for CMOs to articulate their vision and foster strong relationships with other executive roles, like the CFO and Chief Product Officer.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. breadth [brɛdθ] - (noun) - The distance or measurement from side to side of something; a wide range or extent. - Synonyms: (width, span, range)

And she's got a wildly broad portfolio, in particular for CMOs and a relatively unusual breadth of accountability.

2. articulate [ɑːrˈtɪkjʊlət] - (verb) - To express an idea or feeling fluently and coherently. - Synonyms: (express, convey, communicate)

A CMO not properly articulating what they are there to do and how they intend to do it.

3. incrementality [ɪnkrəˌmɛntælɪti] - (noun) - The quality of being incremental or additive, particularly in how a business effort contributes to overall success. - Synonyms: (additive nature, gradual increase, additional impact)

The model we use to determine incrementality of our efforts.

4. strategic [strəˈtiːdʒɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to the identification of long-term or overall aims and interests and the means of achieving them. - Synonyms: (tactical, calculated, planned)

And the reason I did that was strategic.

5. resiliency [rɪˈzɪljənsi] - (noun) - The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. - Synonyms: (flexibility, adaptability, robustness)

You and I were talking about resiliency.

6. competence [ˈkɑːmpɪtəns] - (noun) - The ability to do something successfully or efficiently. - Synonyms: (capability, proficiency, skill)

You need to be really good at everything in between.

7. valuation [ˌvæljuˈeɪʃən] - (noun) - An estimation of something's worth, especially one carried out officially. - Synonyms: (assessment, appraisal, pricing)

A pragmatic consideration and evaluation

8. harmonious [hɑːrˈmoʊniəs] - (adjective) - Free from disagreement or dissent; harmonious relationships are peaceful and agreeable. - Synonyms: (consistent, congruent, complementary)

It started to feel much more harmonious.

9. adage [ˈædɪdʒ] - (noun) - A proverb or short statement expressing a general truth. - Synonyms: (proverb, saying, maxim)

And also the adage is true, everyone knows if they like an ad, right and so it seems easy.

10. curation [kjʊˈreɪʃən] - (noun) - The selection, organization, and presentation of content, typically using professional or expert knowledge. - Synonyms: (selection, organization, presentation)

We really were mostly an internal creative services function now.

Pinterest's Andrèa Mallard On The Marketing Value Of Marketers Undervaluing Their Work

Welcome Back to the CEO's guide to marketing. I'm Seth Matlins, and on today's episode, I'm speaking with Andrea Millard. And Andrea is the global Chief Marketing Communications Officer at Pinterest. And she's got a wildly broad portfolio, in particular for CMOs and a relatively unusual breadth of accountability, which we're going to talk about. Get ready. And she oversees teams responsible for comms, marketing, and product functions, including all global brand, product and performance marketing, internal and external communications, product design, and all go to market efforts for both consumers and advertisers. Before joining Pinterest, Trey was CMO of Athleta, the women's apparel brand of digital health pioneer Omada Health. Visit. That's it. All right. Just want to make sure I got that right. And she spent nearly eight years at ideo. Among her many accolades. I'm just going to call out three. In 2023, Dre was named to both the Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO list and our world's Most Influential CMOS list, a recognition she earned again this year in 2024. In full disclosure, Dre also helped me get a tattoo in Cannes, something that she declined to join me in doing herself, which we may or may not get into. All right, Trey, thank you so much for being here. Such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

All right, let's get into it. For those who have been listening to our first five episodes, we typically have done 10 questions in five minutes. I think we're going to do seven questions in as quickly as we can. We've cut down. We're learning as we go along. All right, you ready? Yes. First question. Marketing is the very well told story of your why a brand is the what and how thoughtfully delivered. Oh, I love that. The hardest part of being a CMO is I think, the breadth of functional areas you need to be literate or conversant in at a very high level. So on an ordinary day, I could be talking about the ordinary least squares regression analysis we need to. I have no idea what any of that just meant. The model we use to determine incrementality of our efforts and jump from that to a meeting about where we edit that particular piece of footage to make it funnier on a spot that we're working on. So the movement from science to art is absolutely enormous, and you need to be really good at everything in between.

Antonio Luccio, who's now back as CMO of hp, said something to me a couple years ago. He said, and I may have mentioned this in an earlier episode. But he said today's CMO needs to be the CEO of the function because the breadth and depth, the sheer number of variables is impossible to be expert in all of. So, to your point, conversant in most of them. So what's the hardest part of being a CEO from your perspective as a cmo? Gosh, you know, I think any form of leadership is hard. I think the bravery a CEO needs to show to make decisions with incomplete information that have far reaching implications for the business is not to be underestimated. And I think that's an incredibly difficult, lonely, vulnerable place to be. I'm wondering if you think, and I'm going to digress for a second, that a CMO is also faced with that same requirement to make decisions based on incomplete information 100%. And I'll up the ante a little bit. I think the CMO is the most, in many ways, it's the most emotionally vulnerable position in the company because the odds of public ritual humiliation, you know, the CMO or the CEO, the CMO just as much as the CEO, I would say, you know, and there's not that many other C level roles where I would say that's likely to happen. Maybe it's public facing.

Yeah, yeah. I think if a CMO launches a mistimed or, you know, ill received campaign, their name ends up front page news and their family life ends up front page news. I mean, there are very few other, there are very few other functional roles where that is a very likely outcome, where the public opines on the worthiness of that effort or of that leader in quite the way that they do for the CMO and to the CEO. So I think they're both quite. You have to have a certain mettle in either of those positions, I think. Yeah, you and I were talking about resiliency. It requires that. And as you talk about it, I think about Leonard Hornick, who is the CMO at Jaguar Land Rover, has gone through some of that. Everybody has an opinion on what he's done, but only globally. Right. But it's just the entire planet. All right. So the biggest tension between a CMO and her C Suite colleagues is the result of what do you think? Recognizing that it varies. Of course, I think it varies absolutely. But. But broadly it would be maybe a misunderstanding from the C Suite. Well, there's two things. A CMO not properly articulating what they are there to do and how they intend to do it and how we will know if it's going in the right direction. So I think first it's always accountability first to the CMO in my opinion. But the other side of that, I would say is perhaps the C level believing or being trained to believe that the marketing is what happens at the end.

And it's the soft shoe tap dance at the end of the sentence, when in fact it's the thing that should dictate how the sentence begins, if done well and done thoughtfully and done with the right insights about the consumer, about the market. So it's a mismatch between properly setting expectations and their expectation and understanding of when does marketing play a role and having perhaps not the right understanding of where it where physically in time, when and where it comes in. So I tend to think that your articulation there, that mismatch between expectations of when and where marketing plays a role, I mean it's central to why we created this podcast to begin with is why do you think that that's happened over time? Like why does today's CEO, cfo, so many of them who don't have marketing backgrounds, think marketing is what happens at the end? To use your words? That's such a good question. I mean there's a few things, right? One is just, I think because marketing used to be exactly that. It used to be the product, whatever it was, was being designed and created. And then you went to the agency and you asked tell us a story about this, make this cool, make this whatever it was. Luckily, as sort of design thinking and other ways of product design innovation came into to become the way of business, we understood that insights and things needed to really lead that.

And very often insights and voice of the customer was the purview of the cmo. So we got a little bit more, I think in lockstep maybe 15 years ago it started to feel much more harmonious. But then with the advent of performance marketing, suddenly everything became measurable, or so it seemed to the CEO, the C suite. And suddenly it became only that which was easy to measure was valued and that which was difficult to measure wasn't. And suddenly you had this entire swath of marketing art and science disappear and a real focus on this very bottom funnel behavior. So I think they got a little out of line there. Now really good marketers I think now have managed to instrument all up and down the funnel and start to rebuild that trust and that understanding of how they are driving growth. But I think it's difficult because it's a fast moving industry with also the adage is true, everyone knows if they like an ad, right and so it seems easy, it seems effortless. So why can't you make the Apple ad? Why can't you make the Nike ad that looks like that costs a couple thousand dollars? There's just a misunderstanding of what it takes to do great creative, which is really hard, actually. It's really, really hard.

One of the things I was interested in your bio because you're such a brilliant marketer was in the bio, there's actually you call out brand and performance marketing as opposed to marketing. Right. And if we think about performance marketing, and I know there are people in the audience saying, I can't believe he's going to fucking talk about brand and performance marketing. So bear with me everyone. Performance marketing is really a channel conversation. That's right. That's right. Do you think that going back to what you said, right, in thinking we could measure everything, one of the things that I find is, yeah, we can measure everything, but are we measuring the right things? And do the measurements actually matter? Right. And I'm kind of getting ahead of how I was going to let this conversation flow. But this point ties back when I said I didn't understand a word you just said when you talked about the incrementality, how you measure for it. How, how are you measuring for incrementality? Because that's what matters most or is amongst the things that matters most. How are you guys doing it? Well, I mean, it's actually so fascinating the complexity of the models that are being used. And so the very first person I hired when I got to Pinterest was a brilliant head of performance marketing. And the reason I did that was strategic. First of all, I thought it was what we needed most immediately, but also I knew that we needed to earn the right to grow to bigger and better things.

And so the bottom funnel, the last click stuff is relatively easy to measure. It's gotten harder to measure with privacy regulation, rightfully so. But there are clear ways that can be done, right? It's very, very clear. But even the top of funnel stuff is very measurable. So we know exactly what our top of funnel, our brand work delivers in terms of incremental mao. Right. It's pretty. There's a lot of, I don't want to bore you with it, but there's a lot of geo testing, lift studies, hold back. There are really well understood techniques to decide and to determine what is this doing to our business. And the reason I always think about brand and I'll put product in the middle. Brand marketing, product marketing, performance marketing as a suite of channels and tools and tactics that must work together is that we measure what happens when we just have performance in market, what happens when we have brand in performance, what happens when we have brand product in performance. You know, these things affect each other. Right. They're all in this. You know, the audience is one audience who's seen all of this content in some order. Right. It's the sum total. Of course it's a sum total. But, you know, I want to be responsible. Where's the next best incremental dollar spent at this company? And so I know, yes, it should be on performance. No, it should be on brand. No, it shouldn't be in marketing at all. I'm going to shift this budget to engineering. And we have those conversations all the time.

So the quote about, I'm the CEO of the marketing. Org. I think that's true. But mostly I'm a steward of the business. Exactly. And so I'm not here to defend the best interests of the marketing team. I'm not the elected official of the country of marketing. I'm here to do what the business needs us to do. And if I do that every single quarter, marketing tends to thrive in that environment. Right. And marketing tends to be a better driver of growth and profitability. By the way, I kind of feel like we should buy a little island and make it the marketing island. And you could be the governor thereof or prime minister. I think that that's. By the way, while this is for the rest of the C suite, I think that's a very important lesson for our CMO colleagues who oftentime, in my opinion and observation, confuse objectives with strategies with tactics. Right. When I hear that somebody is talking about, well, I'm really dedicated to building brand, I'm like, sure, as long as you understand that brand is in service of growth. Brand is a strategy. That's right. It either differentiates and compels and sense it's the greatest influencer to purchase or it's not. That's right. And I feel like a lot don't get that. I think that's right. And also, you'll never have a better marketing surface than your product.

So a really good CMO needs to understand, hey, I might be driving all these users or all these consumers, but they're churning quickly. Or they are the right people, but they are not engaging with the product the way we think. So actually, I don't want to spend another dollar on marketing until we figure out what's going on here and how do we invest more in this moment. I Think you really need to have a whole brain when you think about these growth tactics or these. To your point, these are all strategies to drive growth or drive resilience or drive. You have to know what you're trying to do versus being so in love with brand is a thought that the answer to every challenge is not brand, actually. And I think you build a lot of credibility in the C suite by. By showing that you understand that. Our CEO says, and I think this is exactly right. Your first team is the executive team. Your second team is your functional team. And so that really helps us all think first, as this is the primary team, this is the secondary team. And it's not because one's more important than the other, but he really wants us thinking at the holistic business level first, functional level section second. And I think that's right. I think it's absolutely right.

I've told this story somewhere, which is first week of my job, of my career, rather. I'm the third person in the marketing department for Avion in the United States. My job is I'm special events coordinator. I hang banners and place coolers at tennis tournaments. Right? That's what I got paid to do. I thought I had fallen into, you know, pig heaven. Yeah, it's amazing. I'm there for a week, one week into my career. The CEO comes by and he says to me, hey, what'd you do to move the business forward today? I was like, I have no fucking idea. And I, like, thought about it, and I just looked at him and I was like, I don't think I caused it to fall back. But in that moment, what he did was he taught me. I think it may be the most important thing anyone's ever said to me in my career. He taught me that even the guy who's placing the coolers and hanging the banners, your job is to move the business forward. That's right. So I want to stay on this. All right. So as relates to growth, everything a company does and does not do theoretic. Well, actually, let me. I'll get to the. Does not do later. Everything a company does connects to the purchase, to the facilitation of purchase, or gets in the way of it. Right?

But while everything connects in most companies, not everything is connected. In fact, org design kind of punches growth in the face. Oftentimes, you oversee, in particular for a cmo, a remarkably broad portfolio, right? In most organizations, comms and cmo, chief comms officer and chief marketing officer are two different people, which I've never understood. But you also have, and in particular of late product responsibilities. Right. Well, all of which serve to be are core parts of the narrative of a business. That's right. So I'm wondering why you think more CEOs don't give more CMOs this kind of integrated purview, this integrated oversight and what from your perspective as somebody who has it, you think the rest of the C suite needs to know about why this alignment of mission and accountability make sense? Well, so I didn't start with it and I think that's actually important. Right. So I started with a more traditional set. In fact, most of the major marketing functions when I arrived at Pinterest had been federated throughout the company. Right. It was sort of interesting. And so the first couple years were just were an experience of earning the right to pull them all back. So com sat elsewhere, performance marketing sat elsewhere. We really were mostly an internal creative services function now.

Tons of talent on the team, don't get me wrong, enormous talent on the team. But really we did experiential and really very little else, all things considered. So first it was how do I build credibility with all my cross functional partners? And that started with making good friends at the head of product and good friends with the head of finance. So I think I tell every cemo, before you're even best friends with the CEO, you become best friends with your Chief Product Officer and Chief Financial Officer. You need to have real mutual understanding of what the three of you are going to do together in an organization. And so as I did that and I started to acquire or earn the right to have some of those functional areas back, including research insights, suddenly it's like, well now we suddenly become much more of the voice, the user. We have a lot of the insights, therefore we have a lot of the instincts as well. And we have an understanding of what the problems are to be solved. And then it starts to feel a lot more natural. If we really understand these problems, we can really be helpful to the product team. We can make sure they have what they need to do the incredible work that they do as well.

And so I think it was over time, hopefully the CEO saw something in me that I was respectfully literate about the pressures that the product team were under and I understood them and I was able to make suggestions that demonstrated I understood. I think a lot of times CMOs might come in with wild suggestions for the product that would bankrupt the company and they're not showing that depth. A pragmatic consideration and evaluation. That's right. And know what it means to adding a feature. It's something that involves potentially hundreds of engineers and six months of effort. And you need to understand that there are real risks and trade offs to these things. So I think a lot of it was just demonstrating literacy and understanding. And then listen, I feel like I just own the end to end. I don't own it. I help oversee with a lot of brilliant leaders who own it. The end to end user experience, let's call it for advertisers and for pinners, what we call them. It's like I know how to, we've learned how to get them to come, you know, to invite them to the experience. We make sure they have the best possible experience on platform. They're seeing what they need to see. They're doing what we think is in their best interests and then they're telling everyone about it at the very end. Right. And so the cycle starts over again.

So to me, it's funny, it felt even though taking on this big part of the product felt initially a little bit intimidating, now it feels very natural. Now it seems it's easier this way. Actually. We're seeing so many more connections to the work. It feels much more effortless than it did before, if that makes any sense. It makes perfect sense to me and I'm old enough that I have never understood the buy and try and quad furcation. I don't know if those are all words, but kind of the disintegration of that experience and management and holistic perspectives. And I was listening to an interview that Brian Chesky did with Nilay Patel of the Verge. He was talking about what's come to be known as, what's it called? Founders Mode. Founder Mode. Founder Mode, Yeah. And he said something, I hope I don't butcher it, but I thought it was so profound in its simplicity, which is. He said, I reorganized from a divisional business to a functional business so that we are all recognizing where what we do contributes to the function. That's right. And it's not siloed incentives. That's right, that's right. And I mean there's countless examples of products and brands where they're just shipping their org chart over and over again. And you can feel it and you can see it and you know, the customer does not care that these are two different teams that live in two different buildings in two different cities.

Doesn't care, doesn't know, doesn't care, doesn't know. And all they feel is a disjointed experience. Right. And so really having that you Know it's such a cliche, but it's true that user centricity and just saying this is ridiculous. This decision is mostly about inertia. It's not really about doing the right thing for the business or the customer. It's mostly inertia. I would say 90% of the time it's mostly inertia that got us here or a logic that just doesn't apply any longer. So being willing to revisit that I think is the point that was being made there. You know, it's really, really saying we're trying to honor this hard won user at all times and to keep our promise to that person, to not drop the ball in the handoffs to each other, which is what ordinarily happens very, very easily if you don't watch out for it. Well, it seems to me that that goes right back to your first two answers to my first two questions. Marketing is. And a brand is. Marketing is your why and a brand is what and how you bring that to life. And if everybody isn't connected to that, they're getting in the way of it. Completely. Completely. So I want to talk about emotion for a second because I get twice a day and it's a Pinterest product.

Right. How am I feeling? Yes. Will you tell me what it's called? Just how we feel. How we Feel. So for those who don't get it, 8:15 in the morning and 6:30 in the evening, I got to program it. I get a text from how we feel that says how are you feeling now? If you follow through, you rate it on you, you provide inputs into that. I never do because I'm a bad user. But no such thing actually. But no, I'm a bad user. But I keep it because it reminds me twice a day to check in with myself and see how I'm feeling. That's right. Right. Because most of the time we're unaware, we're just feeling, we're not aware of feeling. I'm wondering what you know about feeling and about the role of emotion and from the perspective both in marketing to the consumer and the customer, both of whom have in common their humanity. What you know about the role of emotion in leading to purchase, to the end result, to the output and what you think those C suite leaders across the globe who don't come from marketing should know about it. Yeah, I know a lot about it. We know a lot about it. That's why I asked. Well, I say that to say so how we feel is separate from Pinterest. Now and it's a non profit and it's run by the founder of Pinterest, this brilliant guy, Ben Silverman.

Ben Silverman, that's right. I got a story about him. Okay, well, let's make sure we get it on camera. But the germ of the idea was we know a lot about what it feels like for users to use Pinterest and how quickly we can screw that up if we're not careful. Can I ask you to. I want to underline that we know what it feels like for users to use Pinterest. I don't hear enough CMOs thinking that way and understanding that. How do you find that out? Well, it's initially, again, it comes from talking to our users. Now this seems very pedestrian, but actually what they were telling us was, this is my oasis, this is my escape. And it begs the question, escape from what? Why do you think of this as an escape? And of course, it was an escape from social media and it was an escape from the toxicity of what was becoming an increasingly awful experience. And the category that we were often lumped in with, but we're quite different from truthfully, quite purposefully, consciously, purposely. You have to. And what we realized was what might have become, what might have started as accidentally true. If I'm being my most conservative about it, we needed to make deliberately true in the product and make a lot of design decisions. Sorry, just what was it that might have been accidentally true? So there were a lot of things I think that Pinterest could have done to increase engagement and retention that harnessed our most lizard brain to get people to stay on the market. Enraged, to engage. That's right. That the founders of Pinterest inherently were never going to do because that was not in their character. And therefore that became a little bit the culture and the character of the company.

But Bill Reddy has tripled down on that. The current CEO, a current CEO feels exactly the same way. Everyone is in this building because they feel the same way. And they said there is something really critical about a place for people to dream about their own lives without performing it for somebody else, without trying to figure out what the whole world likes about them. They have to figure out who you are and what you like about yourself. And there are certain things that cannot be part of that experience because they destroy it instantly. They destroy it instantly. And so as we got to, I mean, we worked with UC Berkeley, we worked with actual experts and academics to say, how do we protect the emotional well being of our users? For real? For real, for Real, not because it's a nice headline, not because it's a PR move, but because it actually matters. And we believed in the long term this is going to be the most important differentiator for Pinterest. And we're very public about all the things, but there's a lot of things that need to be true on the platform to ensure that that is the case. And a lot of them on the surface look like they're antithetical to growth. We've proven they actually aren't.

But on the surface they may seem that you said something that's so important, which is about playing for the long term. And I'm wondering what you think most companies are thinking about the next quarter. I'm wondering what you think, not what you think, but what has given the organization, the business as a publicly traded company, to think long term and to play a game of meaningful differentiation that might have short term implications as well as long term upside. That's right. So we paid a lot of attention to the signals we were hearing out in the world, so not just with our users, but broadly in culture, and started to believe very deeply that there was a reckoning coming for a lot of social media companies. A lot of the things that we all tolerated as a byproduct of the social media experience felt inexcusable to a lot of folks in the building. And we also saw the effects it was having. There's all sorts of research and literature out there about the effects of too much time on your phone and too much time on social media on young people in particular. And so certainly on the marketing side, we started to really pay attention to Gen Z and really get to know them and really market towards them. And the net effect of that was that we're the only platform that is aging down.

In other words, typically what happens with any app, any social media company is they do really well with their initial cohort and then age with them. They just age up with them and every subsequent cohort gets smaller. At Pinterest, it's exactly the reverse. Right. So they started with, let's say, Gen X, the youngest Gen X, that would be me. Then it was the Millennials and then it was Gen Z. But every single cohort got bigger rather than shrinking. And there are certain others I'm sure you could think about where you think, oh, yeah, no, that's what your mom uses. You know, the young people would say, I would never be on that platform because my mom and dad post there. That's where my grandmother is. So We've had the opposite. And we consciously went built to do that. And what we said was if we're going to really take seriously the emotional well being of our users and if we can speak to them about that and if we can build something that's about honestly, personal space. You know, if you ask the average teenage, you and I both have teenagers at home. If you ask the average teenager, do they want personal space? Absolutely they do. And so I think that's actually a deeper need in a way than social validation though. Everything has been tuned towards social validation because that's animal brain. And that's just an easy, that's an easy thing to trigger. It's harder to trigger the second thing.

But once you're able to tap into it, I think it's much more durable, it's much more resilient, and that's what our numbers are reflecting. So we never stopped growing by the way we grew consistent. We've consistently grown. I think we're one of the few platforms that has consistently grown. Even through the downturn, we consistently grew. But the acceleration of that growth is pretty remarkable. And what our users are telling us, which is we're the last positive corner of the Internet. We're their happy place. People come to us to feel better and to feel like they're investing in themselves and making plans for the future. Which by the way, making plans for the future is one of the most psychologically healthy things you can do for yourself. And so even that simple fact is how do you make the process of making a plan for the future and imagining and dreaming feel more joyful and productive, but still explorative as it really needs to be, especially when you're young. So we really tapped into a very deep human, healthy human need as opposed to an unhealthy human instinct. And that has allowed us to, to build this kind of momentum that I think gave us permission to say, hey, of course there's always short term things you do for growth, that's fine. But as long as they're not incongruent with the long term vision, we feel very confident about where we're headed. And the numbers are proving that to be true.

I love the distinction between kind of human need and human instinct because sometimes our instincts get in the way of needs and wants or the beneficial needs and wants. And so let me use that to get back to the original question, which I took us off topic on, which is what do you know about kind of the architecture of the role of emotion and the architecture of how People make decisions whether it's to buy a pair of shoes or go on Pinterest or not go on Pinterest. That is important for our C Suite colleagues who may not understand to understand. I'm fortunate to have an absolutely brilliant world class research and insights team. Truly exceptional. And we do a lot of research and we continue to do research around the difference between an inspired decision and let's say an impulse decision. Now a lot of the Internet is tuned to provoke impulse purchases, right? We all know we've all been scrolling feeds and there's something, oh great, and I'm going to buy it. Now that's interesting because most impulses, or many impulse decisions, when you get it in the mail, you probably know the feeling. I know the feeling you look at and go, ugh, why did I buy this? Or this is much lower quality than I thought it was going to be. Or ugh, I didn't actually just bought a Chateau Marmont T shirt that way. And yes, it did not make it into the drawer.

Right. And so, you know, over time, again, this might help you in quarter, but over time, really you're breaking a lot of important bonds with the customer or with the consumer. And what we said was when people are doing visual search and they're having this slightly longer search experience on Pinterest, that's a little bit more organic, a little bit more natural. We are visual creatures, after all. They end up being more sure of the decision, they end up feeling better about it, they feel like they found something really good for them. And the bet we're making is that when they purchase it, we think that over time they'll be much less likely to return. They'll be much more likely to be a repeat customer because it's been in a positive environment. It wasn't purchased under duress, it wasn't purchased because of a inherently negative human emotion. And so much of marketing is about that you're not this enough, therefore buy that. Right, Right. We'll market to your sense of individual inadequacy. Exactly. Well said. And so. Well, if you do the opposite of that, we're marketing to your feeling of hope, of optimism, of potential, of the life you're trying to build for yourself. Well, what happens when you do that? And maybe that's a little harder to do and it takes a little bit longer, but what we're betting on is that an inspired decision is far more durable.

And so we're not just, you know, a lot of CMOs are held accountable to the top line only. Yeah. I actually would be excited to see us being held accountable to the bottom line. It's actually not hard to get people to buy your product. It's hard to get them to keep buying it. Yeah. Hardest thing in marketing is to get somebody to buy twice. Exactly. And it's hard to get them to not return it. You know, I used to be a CMO of a retail company, and the CMO wasn't held accountable for how many of the people who bought the product returned it. I actually think they need to be right because now there's a lot of people accountable for that. But If I'm selling 100 things and 60 of them get returned, and by the way, online, it can be up to 60% of things purchased online get returned. I guarantee that's actually losing money for the company ultimately, for sure. But the top line looks healthy as hell. So you have to think again, much more holistically about the business to say it's the right customer who's bought something at the right time that was right for them that they are absolutely going to love. And it might be a slightly slower burn at first, and you have to talk to the public markets about that, but you should see an incredible ramp.

And that's what we're seeing with us. We're seeing, how did those insights then translate in your role as speaking to advertisers, Right, from the kind of consumer side to the customer side? Yeah, well, you know, I used to be an advertiser on Pinterest, so I used to spend money on Pinterest myself, which was a really nice thing for me when I got here because I knew exactly how it felt to be a cmo, spending your money on platforms and wondering if it's working and what you should do. But the first thing I realized was because people come to Pinterest to plan, right? You don't go to Pinterest to pin what you did yesterday or you send save ideas that you're going to do. So we quite literally see the future first. We know what's going to happen before any other platform knows it's going to happen. Everyone else tends to be good at what's happening today. We are good at predicting what's going to happen. And so as soon as I realized that, we started to pull insights at a very deep level about predictive insights, trend data. So now that's called Pinterest Predicts and it's an annual event. But besides that, we also have trend tools that we want marketers and we're trying to train Advertisers to use more to say, you can use all of this data to see where your customer is going, not where they are today, and to make sure you're on the right side of the curve, that it's heading up, not heading down.

And so that's how I really work with a lot of advertisers now, is to say again, you should be thinking top and bottom line incrementality. You should be thinking about where things are going and making sure you're on the ground floor of that organic upswing. And here's how you should also understand the adjacency. So no one comes to Pinterest to just pin kitchen ideas. They do kitchen, then they do beauty, then they do fashion, then they do trips. And you start to see we can build a really interesting taste graph of what are the associations between these products. Hundreds of products, maybe. And the more we can give that back. I mean, I remember at, when we were at Athleta and we were looking at the Pinterest data, we found out that the best time to acquire a user, an Athleta user, was when they were pregnant. Right. We saw that on Pinterest and I remember thinking, and everyone had a good theory for why. And it was like, oh, because you want to get in shape. You suddenly care about being healthy. You want to buy these athletic products. And Pinterest said, no, it's because the pants are stretchy. It's because the pants are stretchy. And they know that because they were saving athletic products under board names that said stretchy pants for big bellies.

That's what women were. So we had this really interesting qual quant combination that was so beautiful on Pinterest that said, oh my gosh, now we can talk to them about health and all those things, but let's be clear about just the product that they love and why they like it at this moment and make the right inference, not the wrong one, because we're not actually paying attention to both qual and quant. It's interesting. It reminds me that too often we are myopically focused on what we are selling rather than what they're buying. That's right. Oh, well said. Well said. What they were buying was the stretchy pants. That's right. That's right. That had a functional utility that laddered up to an emo or actually stem from an emotional need. That's right. A friend of mine, Craig Koslik, I don't know if you know him, Craig just stepped down as CRO at Conde he posted something, I thought that was super profound like two months ago. And I haven't asked his permission, but it was on LinkedIn, so, you know, it's kind of public. He says advertising has devolved into the gamification of attribution. You win if you can connect ad exposure to financial data data. So you're winning with the cfo, not the consumer, not the end user. And I'm wondering, and this kind of ties to something you said earlier, but I'm wondering what you think of that.

And I'm wondering if you can tell me about a time when, not here, when you had a conversation where you couldn't convince a C suite colleague that you needed to convince that you actually knew what the hell you were talking about and therefore weren't able to get something done because of their absence of marketing experience. So, I mean, more or less that happens all the time. We'll say I don't have that now, thank goodness. But a lot of that was because a lot of our models we co authored with our finance partners, right? So I said, look, I'm not interested in grading my own homework. I've always been interested in that I do very well. You're a phenomenal student. No, actually, I actually kind of like saying I want you to grade my homework. Let's agree though on what we think the parameters are. Let's have biz ops help co author this model with us and then let's see what we can do. But where I've been in situations where that's been more challenging, meaning, and the classic one is I'm all in on performance. I don't believe in brand. You know, it doesn't have value. As if they were separate. As if brand wasn't the greatest performance engine ever. That's right. I mean, I always joke that the best thing performance marketing ever did for itself was call itself performance marketing. You know, genius. Absolute brilliant branding. You know how I learned brilliant branding? Brilliant branding.

But I say, okay, well tell me about the brands you love. Just tell me which ones you love. And not a single CEO in the history of the world has ever named any brand they love because of the couponing bottom funnel strategy of that brand. They always say, you know, I watched it was the find you'd greatness Nike spot of the boy running down the dirt road in Wales that made me believe that greatness was in anybody, including me. Or they'll name actually very big brand moments or the sort of irrational reasons they love. And all of those came because of hard won investment in those stories, right? And in the product attributes, the stories have earned the right to celebrate. So when I say that, I'll say, listen, we want to build a world class company and a world class brand. And if you want to build an Apple or a Disney or an Airbnb, you need to invest thoughtfully for that. And we're going to do that together. And we're going to earn the right to grow over time. And, and here's the roadmap of how we're going to do it. Now, you can't always get everyone there necessarily, but I've always been. I don't know that I've, I've always managed to do it. So that sounds very arrogant, but there you go, creating your own homework again.

Here's what I'll say, because, like, I don't want them to believe me on faith. This is not a religion. You don't need to believe what I'm doing. We need to do it over time. And then if I knock it out of the park with a million dollars, maybe you can give me 5 million next time. But here's what's interesting to me. I think you're absolutely right. Of course, you're absolutely right. But while you don't, and again, speaking broadly right across the industry, not just about you, while you don't want them to believe on faith, they're quite happy to oftentimes tell you what's wrong on faith without understanding. Why do you think everyone thinks they're entitled to a opinion on marketing? Well, because everyone knows if they like an ad or not. You know, it's as simple as that. Everybody knows if you like an ad or not. You know, Sorry, No, I mean, that's why. That's the answer. So they know whether they like the ad. And yet what oftentimes sometimes isn't the case or is not considered is that they're not the fucking target. That's right. I remember when I was at caa, I had a client that I will keep nameless, but one of the biggest brands in the world for decades. We were in Hong Kong at a series of global meetings. This is like 20 years ago. The global CMO in the middle of the meeting, looks at his phone, he's like, I got to take this call.

He walks out, comes back in, and it looked like he got punched in the face, right? And he actually had by the chairman of the board who saw their new spot, which had one of the biggest celebrities in the world in it and her belly button was showing and this octogenarian chairman of the board said, take that spot down right now. Our brand does not have belly buttons showing. Now the octogenarian did not recognize that the ad was targeted at 17 year old young women and was outraged. Not to target millions and millions of dollars wasted hundreds and hundreds of hours. Yes, well, so let me play the other side of that though, because every marketer has been in that situation. But again, I would say great, so let's learn from that. And there was a world where you could have gone to the chairman and said, said, I'm going to show you what we're doing, why we're doing it this way and I'm going to prepare you. What would be offensive to your generation, I promise, doesn't mean to this generation what it means to you. Yes, and you don't need to worry about that. And we are going to, if we have to, we're going to launch it in New Zealand first, only in New Zealand. And we are going to monitor what, what the reaction is on social. We're gonna monitor all those things so that you know that the deep offense you feel is not shared by most or in fact any, you know, even though that takes longer and it can be so frustrating as a cmo, like if that's what it takes, I want to win, I want this to work. And if that's a hurdle, then I gotta meet that moment too. You gotta market internally 100%.

And I think, you know a lot of again, when you. The problem with this role and the beauty of this role is it's art and it's science and people don't do this if you don't love it because it's so hard. So you've got to love it and you feel it in your bones. And when great creative works, I float on air out of the. When I know we got it, it's the best feeling in the world. But you have to still be willing to talk turkey with people who won't feel that way about it. And you have to speak their language, you can't ask them to speak yours. And this is the function more than any that requires that. So you have to be pretty multilingual and you have to have the patience to do that. Otherwise it's an exercise in exhaustion. I think. Yes. Leads me to my next question, which is the second to last one as we're getting on time, which is. It's a pretty broad question. Of course the answer varies by a million variables. But what do you think is wrong with marketing? You know, I mean, it's a loaded question. I would say it's not what's wrong with marketing, it's what the opportunity is for marketing, and it's what we've talked about already. I think the best thing any marketing leader can do for themselves is understand the other disciplines. I think if you can develop that understanding, you will be feeling much less likely, like you're screaming into the void and much more able to communicate the plan.

And by the way, be a lot more open to the pushback. I don't think every piece of pushback is wrong or irrational. You know, I've seen plenty of people driving without a license and being very convicted in what they're saying. And I've thought to myself, no, you're wrong about that, actually. You're only thinking about it through your lens. You've missed all these other things, and it's making you less of a marketer. So it's like, I don't know that there's as much wrong with marketing as much as there's just this beautiful opportunity to think much more broadly about what the role is and how it needs to interface with everybody else. And I think if you can do that and invest, it takes time to learn that. It becomes so much easier to do the job. You know, I think the most amazing thing, our current CFO and CEO were annoyed with me. And annoyed is a too strong a word. But we're like, your attribution model is way too conservative for what you're taking credit for driving for this company. It's really conservative. And I was like, listen, I actually thought I was being a good steward. I thought I was being really responsible by being the most conservative I could be because I didn't want to take any credit. Yeah. For what I shouldn't. Because typically that's what happens in marketing is they take credit. You know, the feeling that the stereotype is you're taking credit for everything that happens. It's marketing.

And I was sort of the opposite. And they said, you're too far on the other side, you know, and so we got a lot more thoughtful about our own attribution model. And so it was really nice to see that actually go in the opposite direction, you know, and realizing. And when that happened, I thought, ah, now we're partners, you know, because now they're pushing me to be more aggressive in the claims we make for what we're driving for this business versus less aggressive, which is typically direction. So I think my counsel for any future CMO is actually to start conservative about what you can under promise and over deliver under promise or even undervalue what you do, believe it or not, slightly undervalue it because at least that's going to put you maybe a little bit more in line with everyone else, right? Temporarily. Temporarily. I'm not saying you wouldn't be in this function if you didn't believe in it, but I think if you can start a little lower rather than way up here, it's so much harder to go like this than to move up like this with everybody. Yeah, for sure. And so maybe it's a bit more of patience and humility is needed if anything is wrong and cross Functional literacy. You remind me of when I was in college I did an outdoor leadership program.

Right. A month in the Wind River Range in small groups. And one of the leaders said at our first night in camp, said if you do more than you think is your fair share within your group, you're probably doing your fair share. That's right. Well said by them. And I had one last question, but you made me think of one that I'll ask in front of it, which is I am of the opinion you may disagree. There's no such thing as a perfect attribution model. Sure. Right. And I wonder if you have a thought as to why and maybe you disagree with my premise, in which case, please do. Why marketing seems to be held to a level of to an expectation of absolute certainty and predictability that literally these same Chief executives and CFOs would expect from no other investment in their world and nothing else and no one else in their world. That is such a good question. I've wondered that myself. It's a good question and I don't think I can answer it, but I think I have a little bit of a solution for it, which is we are instrumented up the wazoo. We know a lot of what we do is coin operated now by design. Right. So a dollar in X dollars out within X many months. And we know how this machine works. We do not have that same fidelity often in other aspects of the business. And so a lot of it was like, hey listen, because my job again I'm the first team is the Pinterest team. The second team is the functional one. I actually am very interested to know if the next dollar is best spent with me or with that team.

But I don't know that if we're not measuring what that team is doing as well with some degree of fidelity doesn't need to be perfect. But you know, when we build a so for a digital product. If you're building an organic feature with some assumption of increased retention or increased usage, to what extent is that coming true over time? And let's not call that organic. It costs a lot of money to do that. Right. It cost very expensive machine learning engineers. It costs, you know, it cost real money. Can you have some understanding of what it cost us in time resources trade offs to do that thing? It's in the millions, I guarantee it. Then you can start having a conversation about that was meant to drive this many more mao. It didn't. Those dollars would have been better spent in marketing. Darn it. I prefer they were spent in product. I think that's better overall. But we've started to be able to have those kinds of conversations and I think that. And that's about again, having a good relationship with the product person.

Right. Because otherwise you're right. Marketing is scrutinized. I think in a way very few other disciplines are. Marketing spend is scrutinized because it's so discretionary. But that's what makes it so powerful because I can turn it on and off whenever I want, especially working media. It's really hard to have an entire organization or a functional area or a team go away if what they're doing isn't working. That's an interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. So I think you have to instrument on both sides of the equation. So what does it cost us to build anything at this company and which one is working harder for us right now? Right now so we can make those decisions. So I think the most sophisticated companies are able to do that and are doing that these days.

All right, last question. You've talked from the beginning and then throughout a couple of times, a few times about the art and science. Yes. And I'm wondering if there's something about the art and science as in particular the science evolves. Right. But I think the art is required to adapt. The science is evolving that you're wrestling with and trying to get your brain around. You know, I think. Well, it's interesting. I think a lot of. I think before marketers had to really understand I'm building this type of creative for this type of channel for this type of purpose. And you did that very manually and you had a whole industry around planners and you had everything doing that. And the way you were taught to think was sort of in those terms manually. Now you have a lot of AI powered tools where actually you no longer need to make those decisions at all.

You're almost saying, okay, platform I'm giving you some creative. I'm giving you some understanding of the roas. I need to see you figure everything else out. You tell me where, who I. You know, it all kind of happens automatically, automagically. Automatically. Exactly right. And so, you know, now there's problems with that, too. It can be very black box and you actually don't know. You know, it seems like it's working, but I'm not exactly sure why. You know, you lose all those insights as part of that. But to me, it's a really interesting moment to say, what do you need to be able to do as a marketer in a world where a lot of machines will be making a lot of the foundational decisions on your behalf going forward? I don't know if I'm wrestling with that so much as deeply curious about what that means, therefore. So what do I need to be great at in a world where that piece might start to be a little bit more automatically done for us? What are the new skills I need to bring to bear to be excellent and to get all the maximum value out of that free time I've garnered because of the machine? Do you think that that changes influences one of your very first comments, which, when we were talking about the CEO of the function, which are all the things you have to be conversant in, will you have to be less conversant as technology advances or to the contrary? I think almost to the contrary, you know, so, you know, we have a fabulous engineering team, fabulous engineering leaders, and I am watching him like a hawk. I want to understand how we're using AI, how does it work? Even our performance marketing team, who are also using AI, I'm right there with them. I want to know the latest and greatest at all times, because we're starting to see all sorts of ways to apply it in ways we wouldn't have imagined.

So I'll give one example. There's plenty of AI out there right now that will take a product shot and put a background on it for you. That's kind of ubiquitous. But on Pinterest, we can do that in a much more interesting way, actually. Because if you're on Pinterest, we've come to learn. I am, by the way. And you are. Thank you. We've come to learn that you. I'm, you know, making this up, but let's say you're a maximalist and your taste tends to gravitate towards maximalism. Mine gravitates towards minimalism. I am, by the way, a maximalist. I Believe it. I can tell by your glasses. And. But. So that means when we're showing you a chair, we are better off to put that in a maximalist room. And for me, you're better off to put it in a japandi, Japan, Scandinavian. Now, same chair, same product, completely different read. Completely different read. So this is. Yes, AI is helpful. It helped us find a background. But you still needed the Pinterest intelligence. You still needed the insight from a data scientist and a product person who said, what can Pinterest do that others can't or won't? Well, this is something that, because of the nature of the platform, that is right in our wheelhouse and is a huge benefit to the advertiser and to the user.

Let's use AI and tune it in that direction. So I think it actually unleashes a lot of creativity. You just really need to know thyself and know what your platform or your product or whatever it is, is unique, uniquely good, best at doing, you know, and all that. Know thy user and know thy user. I'm gonna tell you my. Can I tell you my Ben Silverman story really quick? It's 2010, I've left as CMO of Live Nation and I'm starting a women's brand that my intention, and this was an absolute failure, was to create the most meaningful women's brand in the world. Very nice. Right. It was gonna start with what I called a site. It was really a blog. It was a platform for self expression. Okay. As I'm like just getting going, I read an article about this new platform called Pinterest. This is 2010. Oh no, there's a guy named Ben Silverman who's the founder, by the way. It's a lovely story.

Yeah. No, no. Oh, nos, don't worry. No, I just meant I hope you didn't pass up a chance to invest or something like, okay. Oh God, I was not given one, sadly. So I'm like, you know, I have the hubris coming from Hollywood that like I could get in touch with anyone anytime. So I hear what this guy is doing, or I read what this guy is doing, I find his email, I send him a note. I was like, hey, I have a startup too, like yours. Mine is in the self expression space. Maybe there's something we could do together. Sure. He writes me back and he says, thank you so much for reaching out. We're gonna stay focused on our plan. A year later, Pinterest was everywhere. Two years later, I thought to myself, you know, Ben has had a much better 720 days than I have had. And look at this. And look at me. Well, I think you're. Listen, there are a lot of ways to create a life you love, and I think you've got a pretty good one, too, so. And that is a beautiful way to end this.

LEADERSHIP, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, INNOVATION, MARKETING STRATEGY, PINTEREST, C-SUITE PERSPECTIVE, FORBES