“The best thing you can find online is a reason to go offline.”
So reads the tagline at the end of Pinterest’s recent brand campaign ‘How Did They Do It?’.
It’s a position that challenges much of the digital and social media industry’s work to keep users engaged with content through auto-playing videos, endless scroll, dark patterns and more.
But as Xanthe Wells, Pinterest’s global VP of creative, told B&T at Cairns Crocodiles, it all makes complete sense for the platform. And it makes commercial sense for brands.
“This narrative is really important because it’s changed over the past year. We started working on this idea about a year ago. How are we going to come out to the world about what we stand for and especially in this current moment in time? How do we differentiate ourselves from social media?” Wells said.
“I’ve done a lot of campaigns. I love this business. But reaction to this work has been moving because it struck a chord and we see it around the world… I think it strikes a chord. It’s a nostalgic yearning for a time that has passed and also this feeling inside use that we’re missing something that people in the 60s, 70s and even 80s had before all these devices. Interestingly enough, Pinterest has always been about getting new ideas and then getting you off Pinterest. We just never really articulated it that way.”
The campaign’s thrust is backed by data.
In Australia, more than three-quarters of Pinterest users agree that what they discover on Pinterest often leads to positive, real-world experiences, more so than other platforms and some 77 per cent of Pinterest users in Australia it supports their personal goals, compared to just 46 per cent of users, on average, for other platforms.
One generation in particular, Wells said has had its fill of technology.
“Gen Z is rejecting the very technology it grew up on. What makes it so interesting is they’re not just asking for less screen time, they’re asking for the things that screens replaced,” she said.
Pinterest’s trend forecasting tools have spotted this changing pattern, with searches for ‘screen-free ideas’ climbing 35 per cent, ‘analogue aesthetic’ climbing 260 per cent, ‘whimsical dinner party ideas’ up 185 per cent. More than four-fifths of Gen Z adults wish they could disconnect more easily and 40 per cent of zoomers wish that social media had never been invented.
“The great unplugging is not fringe. My own 14-year-old, for two years now, has had timers on certain apps. She’s so self-aware of what’s going on and is doing something about it,” Wells said.
Marketers should take note of that shift in consumer mindset. Not only will it affect how they reach people to influence buying choices, but it will influence consumers’ perception of their brands and what they stand for.
“Marketers when they’re at their best are really good at having empathy for their audience. A deeper empathy than just ‘What do I want to say to them?’ but what do you want them to experience,” Wells said.
“I’ve encountered marketers—and marketers on the Pinterest team—who have that. And the work I see in award show juries, the best work that surfaces is truly based on how can I benefit the end user, like the AXA ‘Three Words’ campaign that won so much in Cannes last year. It’s a simple idea that is totally for the audience. It’s beautiful and it helps people and it’s the right thing to do. Oh, and by the way, their business did benefit from it.”
Getting to a simple, universal truth is not straightforward. But it requires a willingness to strip the fat on ideas and think bolder in a way that defies much of the daily rhythm of life inside marketing teams and agencies.
“I hope [empathy] can be taught and learned,” said Wells.
“When I work with marketers, often there’s a brief with 1,000 bullet points that you want to simplify to one key message but then I will often challenge and push and ask ‘Does anyone care? What are they feeling when this message reaches them? What mind state are they in?’
“It’s so hard but I sympathise. Marketers have to boil the oceans to get something into one simple brief. But I think they need to go a step further and put themselves on the receiving end of the message and say ‘If I saw this out in the world, would I respond to it? Would I feel anything? Would I care? Would I take action?'”
Businesses have managed to build a sense empathy and understanding of consumers into their workflows, however. Amazon, Wells said, has an “obsessive” focus on the customer.
“For tech companies, that often gets lost in the might and dazzle of engineering but they have built an entire business around that obsession. I think you can extend that to marketing. It’s just a slip that has happened where, as the world gets more complex and marketers have a deliverables page with 70 things on it, they get lost in the sheet magnitude and velocity that they need to go to market,” Wells said.
“We were on information overload before. Now with AI, it’s infinitely larger. I think you have to do the thing that other people are not doing, which is sitting in an empty space and asking ‘How do I actually make work that will cut through?’ You have every possible piece of information at your fingertips, you’ve got a strategist and an agent sitting there, but is any of this right? Or good?”
For Pinterest, this is not a campaign. It’s a narrative. Its phoneless activation at Coachella was one example. The brand campaign above was another. This idea will keep running, and running, and running. And, at B&T at least, we’re all in favour of it.
