RIYADH: Pinterest recorded more than 1 billion searches in Saudi Arabia last year, with most linked to lifestyle, retail and travel, the company’s chief revenue officer Bill Watkins told Arab News.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Athar Festival in Riyadh, with which Arab News is a media partner, Watkins described the Kingdom as a strategic market where the platform’s global momentum intersects with the ambitions of Vision 2030.
“I think about the population here … the fact that the population is 60 percent Gen Z. Again, Gen Z on Pinterest, it’s our largest, our fastest-growing and our most engaged audience,” he said.
Over the past eight quarters, Pinterest has reached record highs in users, now totaling almost 600 million people globally. Watkins said that the Gen Z cohort has become the heart of the company’s expansion strategy.
Watkins said this demographic alignment places Saudi Arabia at the center of Pinterest’s long-term outlook. “I just think that presents such an opportunity for us to work together and help grow businesses here in Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Pinterest’s relevance to Saudi Arabia’s transformation, he added, lies in the country’s nationwide shift toward lifestyle, retail and tourism investment.
“People come to Pinterest to plan what they’re going to do next, around categories such as food, fashion, home, beauty and travel.
“When you think about what the country is aiming to do around lifestyle, retail and tourism investment, it’s very aligned.”
He added that 96 percent of searches on Pinterest are unbranded, meaning users arrive without preconceived choices, and are searching for ideas rather than products.
“They know that they’re going to travel, but they don’t yet know exactly what they’re going to do or where they’re going to go,” he said.
Watkins cited Red Sea Global as an example of how Saudi companies are using Pinterest to reach potential visitors before travel decisions are finalized.
“They came onto the platform inspiring our users early on in their travel decision-making journey, really to showcase the amazing luxury experiences that they had to offer,” Watkins said.
The results, he added, exceeded industry averages. The Red Sea Global campaign achieved a 74 percent higher engagement rate than Pinterest’s travel-sector benchmark and a 67 percent lower cost for the brand.
Pinterest sees an opportunity to harness its vast data network to help Saudi businesses anticipate trends.
“We have over 500 billion pins or objects from the web that have been organized into over 10 billion collections,” he said. “We’re able to find incredible insights of what people are going to do.”
This dataset, known as the Pinterest Taste Graph, underpins the company’s artificial-intelligence tools. Watkins said its AI-driven advertising solution has delivered an average 20 percent increase in return on ad spend for clients worldwide.
“Search on Pinterest has quadrupled over the last eight quarters,” he said. “In a world where search is being completely disrupted with the advent of Gen AI, search on Pinterest is growing.”
Pinterest has published a “Pinterest Predicts” which forecasts cultural and consumer trends based on platform activity.
“We can tell you what is going to trend in the future,” Watkins said. “Of all of the trends that we predicted, eight out of 10 — or 80 percent — of the time those predictions come true.”
In Saudi Arabia, the data already points to distinct shifts in taste. “Across these billion searches that we’re seeing in KSA alone, we’re seeing that workplace design is trending very significantly on the platform,” Watkins said.
He added that such insights can help local brands “get ahead of the opportunity to create demand in sales and top-line growth.”
Watkins underlined Pinterest’s wider international push. More than 80 percent of its 600 million global users are outside the US, and the platform now reaches more than 30 percent of the online population in the Middle East.
