Pinterest Tries to Pin Down Carnival and Other Travel Marketers
Photo Credit: Pinterest claims it's a cost-effective way to advertise to people who still need inspiration about where to travel. Shown here is the Carnival Cruise Line Pinterest page. The company has recently run an advertising campaign on the visual cataloging service. Skift / Sean O'Neill
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The popular but unprofitable visual search company needs to crack more big-budget marketing accounts to make its financial picture more attractive. This year Pinterest began offering the ability to target ads to subsets of users based on their travel interests. That will help.
Carnival, Visit Florida, and Visit Wales are some of the travel brands that have advertised on Pinterest. But the digital scrapbooking service has barely tapped the budgets of the largest travel brands.
Pinterest, which became a public company in April, is growing in popularity. About 300 million users worldwide logged on at least monthly between April and June. That represented a jump in users of 30 percent, year-over-year, the company said.
Of those, 20.9 million users in the U.S. were "actively engaging" with travel content, the company said.
Recently some notable names in travel have been testing the waters. Exhibit A: Carnival is currently buying ads targeted to appear when Pinterest users searched on keywords that rookie cruise-goers are most likely to use.
The move gave Carnival a chance to buy ads based on images, not text, and reach travelers who had previously not considered a cruise.
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