Pinterest chief marketing officer Claudine Cheever revealed in early November that creators on the platform are measured by how often their boards are saved rather than their follower counts.
Speaking on the Uncensored CMO podcast with host Jon Evans, Cheever stated that follower metrics do not drive success on the visual search engine.
It’s not about how many followers you have,
Cheever said during the podcast appearance posted to YouTube. It’s about how many times your board gets saved and gets repeated.
Cheever joined Pinterest in January after leading global brand and marketing at Amazon.
Successful users on the platform are creators in the true sense who build ideas and demonstrate how to make things. Cheever named Emma Chamberlain as an example of a partner working with the company. Pinterest began testing a feature in October that lets brands promote Pins from creators already in their affiliate or creator programs.
Pinterest counts 640 million monthly active users, with more than half belonging to Gen Z, according to Cheever. Younger audiences use the platform to define personal taste. If you see one black t-shirt, you don’t really know what kind of black t-shirt you like,
Cheever explained, but when you see a thousand of them, you know exactly what kind of black t-shirt.
Cheever argued that the attention economy is a widely held marketing belief that gets things wrong. She pointed out that media channels generating the highest attention often rely on unskippable ads. Her advice to advertisers is to stop building media plans around hijacking attention and focus on content quality instead.
The company published a trend report this year detailing how men plan grooming and trips on the platform. Cheever outlined five additional positions shaping how brands and creators operate on Pinterest. First, attention is overrated. Second, 96 percent of 80 billion monthly searches are unbranded.
People arrive planning outfits, meals, or trips, making brand content a natural fit for what they seek. Pinterest built its Visual Search Ads format, launched in September, around that unbranded search volume. Third, trend data functions as a partnership product alongside annual Pinterest Predicts reports.
Cheever highlighted partnerships like Gimme Gummy tied to a new lip gloss and pop-up from L’Oréal’s NYX brand. Fourth, Pinterest does not have a cash register on the platform. The site pushes clicks to partners’ websites, covering discovery through consideration.
Middle-funnel marketing has always been the hardest part of my career as a CMO,
Cheever stated. That’s what we’re so good at.
Fifth, teen safety is built directly into the brand. Pinterest made accounts for users under 16 private by default independently and displays reminders for teens to log off during school hours. Cheever framed those actions as part of positioning the platform as a place for wellness online.
The measures align with the company’s 2026 brand campaign, which stands against what its chief executive calls a social experiment that nobody signed up for. Cheever also advised marketers to keep creative assets in the market longer. At Amazon, Cheever reran a holiday ad two years after its initial run instead of funding new production, noting it performed better the second time.
We all get tired of our marketing much quicker than customers do,
Cheever said. Cheever reported that the brand campaign raised both monthly and weekly active users, though Pinterest has not published figures tied to the campaign.
