Pinterest CMO: Saves Beat Followers as the Platform's Core Metric

Pinterest's chief marketing officer Claudine Cheever says creators on the platform are measured by how often their boards get saved, not by follower counts. "It's not about how many followers you have. It's about how many times your board gets saved and gets repeated," Cheever told host Jon Evans on the "Uncensored CMO" podcast, posted to YouTube in early November.

Cheever joined Pinterest as CMO in January after leading global brand and marketing at Amazon. She said the creators who perform best are "creators in the true sense of the word" — people who develop ideas and show others how to make things — and named Emma Chamberlain as one partner. The message landed alongside a product shift: in October, Pinterest began testing a feature letting brands promote Pins from creators already in their affiliate or creator programs, without needing an existing partnership.

What does this change for marketers?

Cheever laid out five positions that reshape how brands and creators should use the platform:

• Attention is overrated. Asked which widely held marketing belief is wrong, Cheever named "the attention economy" and argued content quality beats audience size. "If you look at what media channels get the highest attention, it's unskippable ads," she said. Her advice to advertisers: "You really stop building your media plan around hijacking attention."
• Most searches name no brand. "96% of our 80 billion searches a month are unbranded," Cheever said. Users arrive planning an outfit, a meal or a trip, which she argued makes brand content part of what they came to find. Pinterest's Visual Search Ads format, launched in September, was built on that same search volume.
• Trend data is a partnership product. Beyond the annual Pinterest Predicts report, the company publishes smaller trend reports and builds brand deals around them. "We actually do partnerships with brands on some of our trends," Cheever said, citing a "Gimme Gummy" trend tied to a new lip gloss from L'Oréal's NYX brand and a pop-up. She called the trend partnerships "one of my favorite parts of my job."
• Pinterest sends the sale elsewhere. "We don't actually have like the cash register on Pinterest," Cheever said. The platform pushes clicks to partners' websites and pitches itself as covering discovery through consideration. "Middle-funnel marketing has always been the hardest part of my career as a CMO," she said. "That's what we're so good at."
• Teen safety is part of the brand. Pinterest made accounts for users under 16 private by default "on our own," Cheever said, and shows teens a reminder to log off during school hours. She framed those moves as part of being "a place for wellness online," which fits the company's 2026 brand campaign — a stand against what its chief executive calls "a social experiment that none of us really signed up for."

Who's actually on the platform

Pinterest counts 640 million monthly active users, and more than half are Gen Z, Cheever said. Younger users come to define their taste, she explained: "If you see one black t-shirt, you don't really know what kind of black t-shirt you like, but when you see a thousand of them, you know exactly what kind of black t-shirt." The company also published a trend report this year on how men plan grooming and trips on the platform.

Cheever added a practical note for media planners: keep creative in market longer. At Amazon, she reran a holiday ad two years after it first aired instead of funding a new production, and said it performed better the second time. "We all get tired of our marketing much quicker than customers do," she said.

The open question on results

Cheever said the 2026 brand campaign raised both monthly and weekly active users. Pinterest has not published figures tied to the campaign, so that claim rests on her word for now — practitioners should treat it as unverified until the company releases data. With Visual Search Ads, creator-Pin promotion and trend partnerships all rolling out in the past three months, expect Pinterest to keep pushing mid-funnel budget away from follower-count thinking.