Claudine Cheever, who joined Pinterest as chief marketing officer in January after leading global brand and marketing at Amazon, said creators on the platform are measured by how often their boards are saved, in a conversation with host Jon Evans on the “Uncensored CMO” podcast posted to YouTube in early November.

“It’s not about how many followers you have. It’s about how many times your board gets saved and gets repeated,” Cheever said. The creators who do well on Pinterest, Cheever said, are “creators in the true sense of the word” who develop ideas and show people how to make things, and Cheever named Emma Chamberlain as one the company partners with. Pinterest began testing a feature in October that lets brands promote Pins from creators already in their affiliate or creator programs.

Pinterest has 640 million monthly active users, and more than half are Gen Z, Cheever said. Younger users come to define their taste, Cheever said: “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 laid out five more positions that shape how brands and creators can use the platform.

1. Attention is overrated. Asked which widely held marketing belief is wrong, Cheever answered “the attention economy,” and said the quality of a creator’s content matters more than audience size. “If you look at what media channels get the highest attention, it’s unskippable ads,” Cheever said. Cheever’s advice to advertisers: “You really stop building your media plan around hijacking attention.”

2. Most searches name no brand. “96% of our 80 billion searches a month are unbranded,” Cheever said. People arrive planning an outfit, a meal or a trip, which Cheever argued makes brand content part of what they came to find. Pinterest built its Visual Search Ads format, launched in September, around the same search volume.

3. Trend data is a partnership product. Beyond its 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. Cheever called the trend partnerships “one of my favorite parts of my job.”

4. 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,” Cheever said. “That’s what we’re so good at.”

5. 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. Cheever 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.”

Cheever also told marketers to keep creative in market longer. At Amazon, Cheever 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,” Cheever said.

Cheever said the brand campaign raised both monthly and weekly active users. Pinterest has not published figures tied to the campaign.

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