Pitch deck: Pinterest’s Performance+ AI tool makes its case
By Krystal Scanlon • June 26, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
This article is part of an ongoing series for Digiday+ members to gain access to how platforms and brands are pitching advertisers. More from the series →
Eight months after quietly rolling out Performance+, Pinterest is now turning up the volume. The platform’s bid to automate more of its ad business is moving from test phase to full-throated sales pitch.
CEO Bill Ready teed it up recently on the company’s most recent earning call: “While we’re pleased with our progress, we’re still in the early days of driving adoption, and will continue to drive advertisers to adopt the full Performance+ suite of solutions in the quarters and years ahead.”
That moment has arrived. Digiday obtained the pitch deck that shows Pinterest plans to make it happen.
The first few slides of the deck focus on the idea that the less manual work advertisers have to do, the more they can focus on high quality inputs to achieve far better outcomes. According to the deck, marketers who used Performance+ campaigns saw a 10% plus CPA/CPC improvement, compared to those who opted for a traditional campaign set up.
The deck then described “two flavours” of Performance+: advertisers can either opt for a simplified approach – set it and forget it if you will – or mix and match Performance+ products to existing campaigns. Both, the deck insisted, are engineered for outcomes.
Buyers said it’s a step in the right direction. Still, they point to what’s missing: more granular reporting and the ability to toggle specific features on or off. Without that visibility, some say it’s hard to tell where the performance lift is actually coming from.
“Currently, that’s been a limitation on all of these campaign [types] across social media channels,” said AJ Eskew, performance media supervisor at Collective Measures.
Aside from that, buyers also want more control – something Pinterest is working on. According to an email from a Pinterest rep shared with an agency exec, Performance+ campaigns now have the ability to include or exclude any audience type, including site visitor and engagement audiences – a feature most advertisers would find very useful.
“It is the best of both worlds to have the scalable power of algorithmically driven campaigns, while also allowing for certain exclusions or key signals to be passed back to ensure that we are not just reaching folks we could have reached through other means,” said Meagan Traver, director of paid social at Dept.
No matter how advertisers plug into Performance+, they’re getting access to two key betas: Performance+ creative and Performance+ ROAS bidding.
Early results, as laid out in the deck, lean into the promise of automaton driving efficiency. Brands using Performance Creative saw an 11% lift in checkouts when they applied generated backgrounds, and a 14% bump in outbound clicks with creative optimizations. Meanwhile, advertisers testing the ROAS bidding tool saw a 15% improvement in return on ad spend.
It’s Pinterest’s pitch distilled: let the machine do more, and watch the numbers go up.
It wouldn’t be a proper pitch deck without a glimpse into what’s to come. And this deck is no different.
According to the document, Pinterest is set to launch Performance+ promotions on September 5, which enables campaign creatives to be applied with the promo offering. Those advertisers who have already been in alpha testing of the feature saw a 9.1% increase in ROAS, as well as an 8.4% decrease in CPA, compared to the same ads without a promotion, per the deck.
Chris Matheson, media director at Markacy noted that this type of feature is seemingly borrowing from Meta’s playbook on Advantage+.
“Meta is currently doing something similar at the moment where they’re doing automated promo code pulls, so a layover on top of existing ads that pulls a promotion, so that would make sense” he said. “They’re not necessarily seamless yet, but a lot of the time with these functionalities, the engineers will release them and fix any bugs as they go.”
The full deck is below:
https://digiday.com/?p=581893
