Pinterest Presents 2026 Summary

If you sat through Pinterest Presents this year, you’ll know two things by now.

One: Pinterest has become one of the most sophisticated performance platforms in the game.

Two: They will tell you this approx. 4 times during the session, just in case you missed it the first 3 times.

Credit where it’s due, though — when a platform is confident enough to say the same thing 4 different ways and still have you nodding along by the end, they’re probably onto something.

So, let’s talk about what’s landed in 2026, and why the bit that got the least fanfare on stage might be the bit that matters most for your reporting decks. (Fancy seeing how far things have moved in 12 months? Lisa covered Pinterest Presents 2025 here.)

Buried among the shiny new ad formats was a quote from Trevor Testwuide (CEO of Measured), from his discussion alongside Pinterest’s Sonyia Monga (VP, Global Agency & Accounts), that’s worth pinning above your desk (sorry):

“The goal of media measurement is to understand the contribution of the media to an outcome, and today that is an omnichannel outcome. That contribution starts long before that last touch or last click into a conversion.”

Contribution, not credit. Most of us have spent years reporting on Pinterest through a last-touch lens, which is a bit like judging someone’s whole personality on the last thing they said before leaving a party. It misses everything that got them talking to you in the first place.

This is backed by the numbers. Measured looked at 70 recent Pinterest incrementality tests, and when measured properly (not just last-touch), Pinterest can perform 2-4x better than the attribution model most of us have been leaning on gives it credit for.

If you’ve ever had a client ask, “Why are we still spending on Pinterest? I don’t see it converting” – this is your answer.

The practical takeaway: run a proper incrementality test (Pinterest’s own recommendation is 2 to 3 in sequence), get the client, the platform, and the measurement partner in the same room, and let the data do the talking. It’s not glamorous, but it is useful.

With that anchored, here’s what was interesting for Pinterest in 2026…

Visual Search Ads: The Headline Act

People search Pinterest over 80 billion times a month, so it was only a matter of time. Visual Search Ads let you bid for a top spot in search results and in Pin close-ups (that moment you tap into a Pin because something’s caught your eye).

They’re built for lower-funnel objectives, they play nicely with Performance+, and they’re rolling out in beta to eligible advertisers in every Pinterest ad market. If your clients sell anything people shop with their eyes first — fashion, home, beauty, gifting — this is the one I’d test first.

Pinterest Assistant: Shoppable, But Make It Conversational

The new AI-powered Pinterest Assistant lets users work through multi-turn shopping journeys (comparing options, styling a full outfit, restyling a room using their own photos) and every single item surfaced is shoppable.

Think of it less like a chatbot bolted onto the side of the app (we’ve all seen those; they’re rarely good) and more like a genuinely useful shop assistant who happens to remember a decade of your taste history. That’s the bit that makes it different: it’s built on Pinterest Intelligence, which has been learning what users actually want (not just what they click) for years.

Amazon Storefront Linking, Minus the Faff

Creators can now link straight to Amazon Storefronts with automatic affiliate links attached — no manual copying, no broken links, no “sorry the code expired” messages three weeks later. It’s a small thing on paper, but a hugely useful thing in practice, especially for anyone managing creator partnerships where friction is usually what kills conversion.

Connected TV (CTV) Gets a Seat at the Big Kids’ Table

Standalone Connected TV campaigns are now available, and when paired with Spotlight buys, potential reach can climb by up to 75%. For anyone trying to build genuine full-funnel campaigns rather than just optimising the bottom, this is a meaningful lever — especially heading into a holiday season where screens multiply per household anyway.

Priority Products (Live as of 15th Sep)

Performance+ can now shift delivery toward your highest priority catalogue items, which sounds like a small tweak until you remember how much time agencies spend manually nudging budget toward the products that actually matter… that’s an afternoon back in my week.

Also new: self-serve A/B testing, so you can pit creative, targeting, and Performance+ setups against each other yourself (yes, that’s the measurement point again… told you it wasn’t boring).

Pinterest Predicts has an unnervingly good track record — 88% accuracy over 6 years — and this year’s 4 holiday trends are:

Trinket Effect: small extras and accessorised opulence, mini gifts that punch above their size

The Great Offline: adventure gifts, unplugged play, the return of the board game

Artful Entertaining: elevated hosting, coffee stations, “low-key luxe” host gifts

Glow Coded: self-care tools, apothecary upgrades, pyjama party aesthetics

If your clients sit anywhere near gifting, hosting, wellness, or home, there’s a hook in here for every single one of them. (Still pulling peak together? Our Black Friday PPC checklist is a good place to start.)

Pull it together, and the story is consistent, even if Pinterest told it to us 4 different ways over the course of a morning: this is a platform that’s stopped apologising for being different.

It’s not chasing viral loops or doom-scroll metrics; it’s leaning further into intent, taste and (crucially) proper measurement of what that intent is actually worth.

For us, that means two things heading into 2027 planning. First, if you’re still reporting Pinterest performance on last-touch alone, you’re underselling it to your clients. Fix that conversation before budget season, not after.

Second, the new ad and creative tools (Visual Search Ads, Assistant, Priority Products, CTV plus Spotlight, frictionless affiliate linking) give us more surface area to actually act on that intent once we’ve found it.

Pinterest spent an entire webinar telling us, repeatedly, that it’s built for the moment just before you know what you want. Fair enough. They’ve also built a fairly compelling case for why that moment is worth measuring properly, and worth spending against. We’ll take the reminder. All 4 times.