Today, five minutes of scrolling can easily turn into five hours. Toxic feeds never end. Viral videos autoplay. Comment wars pull you back in. In fact, nearly half of U.S. teens now say they spend too much time on social media, with many saying it has a negative affect on people their age. Somewhere along the way, watching other people’s lives replaced living your own.
Pinterest’s new brand campaign calls out the cost of being constantly online and offers a different path forward. It shows what happens when you go off screen and enter the real world. Because while other online platforms often sell the illusion of living, Pinterest helps you create a life you actually want to live.
While social media has been engineered to hijack consumers’ attention for as long as possible, Pinterest was built around something far more valuable: the moment a person moves from inspiration to action.
Most platforms are engineered to keep you scrolling through other people’s lives. Pinterest is engineered to get you off the app and into yours. That’s a fundamentally different value proposition, and this campaign is our boldest statement of that yet. We’re not just launching creative, we’re making a case for what the internet should actually be.
– Claudine Cheever, Chief Marketing Officer, Pinterest
The campaign launches with a :60 anthem film titled “How did they do it?”, produced entirely in-house by Pinterest’s House of Creative, featuring old home movies and photos submitted by Pinterest employees from their family archives. The anthemic film debuted last month in advance of the global campaign launch and captures the freedom of a pre-social media world, when people lived more authentically.
Additional films (such as the one above), creative and out-of-home assets will roll out throughout the year as part of Pinterest’s most ambitious paid media campaign to date, developed in partnership with media agency Mediahub. With high impact placements across TV/Connected TV, OOH, digital and social, the campaign will drive mass awareness, cultural relevance, and measurable growth. In cinema, Pinterest will also own the big screen experience with an exclusive “Silence your Phones” courtesy message at major premieres.
In major cities in the US and UK, Pinterest’s out-of-home campaign leverages Pinterest’s iconic Pin grid to reveal how every saved Pin translates to a life that’s lived and loved offline. In addition to the Pin grid, every piece of creative features a headline rallying you to go off screen and create the life you want to live instead: “It’s about life, not likes.” “Less URL. More IRL.” “Live vicariously through you.” and “A better feed that feeds the soul” are just a few of those featured in the outdoor campaign.
