How much has Pinterest's ad tech stack evolved since you left and how does it compare with Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter today?

There wasn't a huge shift to budgets going there at the time. I also never heard of Snapchat or Twitter advertisers finding direct response success. The biggest complaint with Pinterest was scaling as opposed to performance. Instagram, Facebook and YouTube have an incredibly high monthly active user volume, but those are daily active user platforms whereas Pinterest doesn't have that frequency. Once a CPA conversion-based campaign hit the performance goal but did not scale, we could attribute it to people who would most likely convert, but we weren't able to reach more of them. The restriction there was frequency of usage and customer cohorts not converting.

What were the strengths of Pinterest when it comes to direct response compared to other advertising platforms, and the same question for brands?

Often times, we didn't look great in a one day click return attribution window because not a lot of people on Pinterest make purchase decisions that day. We also used solutions to help them measure Pinterest differently. Once they did that, we had a mutual understanding of performance and what a successful campaign was, because we'd already proven we should be measured that way and validated incrementally. Those advertisers would realize Pinterest was working for them and would invest more. Once we reached a line measurement model for performance, advertisers spent a lot more.