Pinterest Acquires Product Recommendation Startup To Improve Ad Targeting

In a move that should improve its ad targeting ability, Pinterest today announced that it has acquired Kosei, a Palo Alto-based marketing startup that specializes in personalized product recommendations.

Kosei’s machine learning technology maps the 400 relationships between 30 million products, which maps nicely with Pinterest’s move to accelerate its efforts to make money.

Unique among major social networks, Pinterest is a place where people explore and bookmark product information. The site has moved cautiously with its advertising products, finally extending its CPM-based Promoted Pins to all U.S. advertisers this month after testing it for more than a year. A cost-per-click ad product is in development and expected later this year.

By bringing the Kosei technology and management into the fold, Pinterest will be able to improve the “object graph” that maps the connections between people, their interests and the things they want to do in the future, a Pinterest spokesman told Marketing Land.

And with better understanding of customer intent, Pinterest believes it will be able to help brands reach people with relevant targeted ads when they are most receptive to the message.

“With the addition of the Kosei team, we can supercharge our existing graph to help brands reach people at the right moments, and improve content for Pinners,”
Pinterest head of engineering Michael Lopp wrote in a blog post.