Pinterest Acquires Kosei To Improve Its Ad Targeting Abilities

Pinterest has announced its acquisition of 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, and this acquisition should help Pinterest to improve its ad targeting abilities.

Although Pinterest took a while to start making money, this announcement illustrates a new focus in this direction. Pinterest is unique among the major social networks due to users’ exploration and bookmarking of product information on the platform. However, the company has been cautious with its advertising products up until now, and only extended its CPM-based Promoted Pins to all U.S. advertisers this month after testing it for more than a year.

“One of the key ways we provide relevant and scalable solutions is through building distributed systems using machine learning,” wrote Michael Lopp, Pinterest Head of Engineering, in a blog post. “To accelerate our work in discovery and monetization, today we’re announcing the acquisition of Kosei, which includes some of the best minds in machine learning and data science.”

A Pinterest spokesperson explained to Marketing Land that by bringing the Kosei technology and management into the fold, the company 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. Pinterest believes with a better understanding of customer intent, it will be able to help brands to reach users more effectively with relevant targeted ads.

“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,” wrote Lopp.

The acquisition of Kosei appears to be a smart move for Pinterest. The company has turned a great deal of its attention toward its discovery and search engines to help users find even more content, and plugging its paid content into those results is a critical step.

Perhaps this year will mark the time Pinterest ramps up its earning abilities and increases its significance as a platform for marketers to utilize for their campaigns. With its acquisition of Kosei, big moves are likely to be on the way in the coming months.