Pinterest Adds 2 Execs To Ad Operations

Putting its ad operations in good hands, Pinterest on Thursday named Jon Alferness as its new head of ad products and Meredith Guerriero as head of partnerships in the East Region.

Both industry veterans, Alferness previously spent 13 years at Google, where he most recently served as vice president of product management and head of the search giant’s shopping and travel products.

Prior to that role, Alferness spent more than six years working across Google’s ads programs, including search ads, mobile display and AdMob.

Guerriero most recently built and led Facebook’s sales efforts for the healthcare, grocery, politics and advocacy verticals. Also a Google alum, Guerriero served several roles at the tech titan, including leading global strategy and commercialization for its programmatic offerings.

At Pinterest, Alferness will be responsible for leading the partners product organization and defining a long-term vision for the company’s global advertising products, including targeting features and ad formats.

Based in the company’s San Francisco headquarters, Alferness will report directly to Pinterest’s president Tim Kendall. He is expected to get started at the end of August. 

Beginning July 24, Guerriero will also serve as head of Pinterest’s New York office.

Hardly new to the advertising game, Pinterest reportedly expects to rake in $3 billion in revenue in 2018. If accurate, that would be dramatically higher than the roughly $100 million in revenue Pinterest reportedly took in last year. 

Yet Guerriero insists the company has plenty of room to grow. “We’ve only scratched the surface in terms of solutions we’ll be able to provide to partners,” she stated.

Among other efforts, the pin-based platform is pushing brands and businesses to set up Promoted Pins. As encouragement, the visual search and sharing network recently began rolling out a new “Promote” button to launch Promoted Pin campaigns in as little as nine seconds.

Investors continue to watch for signs that Pinterest is preparing to go public. Fueling their interest, the company recently brought on Todd Morgenfeld -- formerly VP of finance at Twitter -- as its first CFO.

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