Brian Monahan, who took care of Walmart‘s online marketing for years, will join Pinterest as its “chief vertical strategy”. His goal is to help the social network become “top of mind” with business branches that are barely present on Pinterest.
Find new product categories
Brian Monahan, Walmart.Com’s vice president, helped create the company’s Walmart Exchange, a marketing tool to provide its largest customers and advertising agencies with store data to optimize their personalized ads. Under his guidance, Walmart.com’s monthly unique visitors grew from 55 to 85 million.
The natural marketeer will now need to “sell” Pinterest to brands and ad agencies. “There are some categories where Pinterest has endemic strength, but increasingly there are mass-audience categories too: automotive, quick-service restaurants, retail, travel, telecom or financial,” Monahan said.
Pinterest is increasingly focused on “brands” (currently fashion, home decoration and other consumer goods) to place content on its platform and to generate income through “buyable pins” and other options. According to the network, 75 % of all content is “pinned” by companies. “There’s this symbiotic relationship between pinners [the company’s term for its users] looking for ideas and brands trying to present their products as worthy of incorporation into their lives”, Monahan added.
Pinterest claims it has about 150 million monthly users, with 70 million from the United States.
