Brendan McDermid/Reuters Tim Kendall, president of Pinterest Inc.
- Pinterest thinks it can challenge the Facebook-Google duopoly.
- Pinterest can lay a claim to the domain of marketing where people are still unsure of what they want, said president Tim Kendall.
- Pinterest is doubling down on building products that aid the discovery process like recommendation feeds.
Google and Facebook have an absolute stranglehold on the digital ad business, and while some believe that Amazon is most likely to emerge as the third leg of the stool, Pinterest president Tim Kendall thinks that the visual search platform can "absolutely" break the so-called duopoly.
"What Google and Facebook have built are basically phenomenal engines for when people already know what they want - it is retargeting based on what you've already done, intent you've already declared," he said, speaking at Business Insider's IGNITION conference in New York on Wednesday. "But when you think about the domain of marketing where I don't quite know what I want, a lot of those dollars are still out there."
Kendall said that Pinterest could stake a claim to those ad dollars, given that people go to Pinterest for visual inspiration and discovery - when they don't know exactly what they want.
"We have a greater stake to those dollars given what we do."
Kendall also seemed unperturbed by the threat of bigger competitors playing catch-up and imitating its core functionality, as was the case with Instagram coming after Snapchat.
"This is a bit of a technology cliché, but you just have to keep innovating," he said. "We need to keep giving people great products, that are more personalized and help them discover stuff that they're excited about and love."
Among the other topics the Pinterest president hit on Wednesday:
- Pinterest is doubling down on building products that aid the discovery process like recommendation feeds.
- He also said that the company is building products that helped people actually use things once they found them. For example, the "Lens your Look" feature lets you take pictures of items in your closet and get ideas for how to wear them.