Pinterest has acquired connected TV advertising platform TvScientific, marking the first time Pinterest has wedded its intent-based audience insights with a CTV advertising engine. Financial terms of the transaction, which is expected to close in the first half of next year, were not disclosed. TvScientific's platform will be integrated directly into Pinterest's performance ad products, including its suite of Pinterest Performance+ artificial intelligence solutions.

The deal is intended to provide Pinterest's advertising partners clearer line of sight into how CTV improves their performance ad campaigns. It also opens an avenue for more cross-screen capabilities, broadening Pinterest further beyond mobile and desktop roots where growth could be harder to come by. Pinterest is seeking to combine TvScientific's CTV capabilities with high-intent audience insights derived from its 600 million monthly active users, a large chunk of whom visit Pinterest for style and product inspiration.

TvScientific Brings Performance Attribution to Connected TV

Pinterest is cracking into the burgeoning CTV space with TvScientific, a startup that aims to make the channel more accessible and measurable for advertisers. TvScientific, which will continue to operate under its own name after the acquisition closes, claims to reach 95% of ad-supported video-on-demand audiences and relies on a proprietary identity solution to tie CTV campaign exposure to business outcomes. Additionally, the firm has an automated media-buying platform and AI-powered optimization tools.

The deal is still subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, but Pinterest indicated the price tag will not be steep enough to have a material impact on its financial results. Pinterest will initially focus on scaling TvScientific in the U.S. before shifting to more international markets. This represents a strategic expansion beyond Pinterest's traditional digital strongholds into channels that historically operated on brand metrics rather than performance attribution.

With TvScientific, Pinterest wants to bring the same level of precision available on digital to CTV. The acquisition helps Pinterest position itself as a more multichannel ad platform as brands seek all-in-one partners and shift more budgets to performance marketing. "People plan and shop across multiple screens, and advertisers need performance solutions that reflect that reality," said Bill Ready, CEO of Pinterest. "For the first time, Pinterest advertisers will be able to evaluate TV with the clarity they expect from their performance channels." 

Intent-Based Audiences Meet Premium Video Inventory

Pinterest has worked to make its site more shoppable—more performant—by linking its data signals with AI technology and an offering called Taste Graph to share personalized recommendations with users. The combination of intent-based audience insights with CTV inventory creates unique targeting capabilities. Unlike social platforms where users passively scroll, Pinterest users actively search for inspiration and products they intend to purchase. This intent signal combined with CTV's premium video environment and large-screen engagement creates powerful targeting precision.

The strategic value lies in connecting high-intent audiences identified through Pinterest behavior with CTV inventory that historically lacked granular targeting capabilities. Traditional TV buying operated on demographic proxies and broad daypart assumptions. TvScientific's identity solution enables tying specific CTV ad exposures to downstream business outcomes—something broadcast and cable TV could never deliver at scale. This transforms CTV from brand-building channel measured through reach and frequency into performance channel measured through conversion and ROI.

For advertisers, this means treating CTV inventory with the same performance expectations as search or social advertising. Instead of buying CTV as top-of-funnel awareness play with murky attribution, brands can now optimize CTV spending based on actual conversion data tied to specific audience segments identified through Pinterest intent signals. This fundamentally changes CTV's role in marketing mix from brand investment to performance channel competing for budget against digital-native platforms.

The Multi-Screen Attribution Challenge Pinterest Is Solving

"Looking ahead, advertisers will be able to buy TV with the performance metrics they are already using, turning Pinterest into a true search, social, and CTV performance solution," Ready added. "This is an exciting progression in our multi-year strategy to drive new sources of demand to Pinterest and begin to allow advertisers to reach our valuable audience beyond our platform." The last phrase matters—"beyond our platform"—because it signals Pinterest's evolution from walled garden to cross-channel performance solution.

Historically, platforms kept audiences within their ecosystems to maximize ad inventory consumption and defend attribution claims. Pinterest's strategy of enabling advertisers to reach Pinterest audiences through CTV inventory represents a different model—one that prioritizes advertiser outcomes over platform containment. This approach recognizes that users don't live within single platforms. They discover products on Pinterest, research on Google, discuss on Reddit, and watch content on CTV. Effective marketing requires following users across this journey rather than forcing journey compression into single-platform conversions.

The technical challenge involves identity resolution across environments with different tracking capabilities. Pinterest has robust user identification through logged-in accounts. CTV environments have historically lacked persistent identifiers, relying instead on device IDs and probabilistic matching. TvScientific's proprietary identity solution bridges this gap, enabling deterministic attribution between Pinterest intent signals and CTV exposure to business outcomes. This is the unsexy infrastructure work that makes cross-screen performance marketing actually possible rather than just aspirational. 

Financial Context Reveals Strategic Growth Pressures

Pinterest saw revenue rise 17% year over year to $1.05 billion for the Q3 period ended September 30. However, the company missed analyst expectations on earnings and shared disappointing guidance for Q4, an important window that includes the holidays. This financial context explains the strategic urgency behind the TvScientific acquisition. Pinterest needs new growth vectors as its core mobile and desktop business matures and faces intensifying competition from Instagram, TikTok, and Google's visual search capabilities.

The 17% revenue growth is respectable but decelerating from previous periods, suggesting Pinterest is approaching saturation in its traditional markets and use cases. Expanding into CTV provides new inventory to sell and new value propositions to pitch advertisers beyond Pinterest's owned-and-operated properties. Instead of competing purely on Pinterest platform performance, the company can now position itself as cross-channel performance solution enabling optimization across search, social, and CTV from unified platform.

This positioning matters because brands increasingly consolidate vendors to reduce complexity and improve attribution. A platform offering performance optimization across multiple channels becomes more valuable and defensible than single-channel solutions, regardless of how well-optimized that single channel performs. Pinterest is making strategic bet that cross-channel performance infrastructure is more valuable long-term than maximizing short-term revenue from owned inventory alone. Whether this trade-off proves correct depends on execution and whether advertisers actually want unified cross-channel platforms or prefer specialized best-of-breed solutions for each channel.

CTV Measurement Sophistication Reaches Digital Parity

The broader industry implication extends beyond Pinterest specifically. TvScientific's integration into Pinterest Performance+ signals that CTV is finally achieving measurement sophistication comparable to digital-native channels. For years, the promise of "addressable TV" remained partially unfulfilled because attribution infrastructure couldn't reliably connect TV exposures to business outcomes at scale. TvScientific's 95% reach of ad-supported VOD audiences with proprietary identity solutions suggests that technical barriers are falling.

This measurement parity fundamentally changes how brands allocate budgets between digital and CTV. When TV operated on reach and frequency metrics while digital delivered conversion attribution, the channels weren't directly comparable. Marketing mix modeling attempted to bridge this gap through statistical inference, but brands treating TV as brand investment and digital as performance investment could justify allocating budgets to both without direct competition. Now that CTV delivers conversion attribution comparable to digital channels, budgets compete directly based on performance efficiency.

The winners in this environment will be platforms that combine superior targeting with premium inventory and sophisticated attribution. Pinterest's bet is that intent-based audiences plus premium CTV inventory plus TvScientific's attribution infrastructure creates unique competitive positioning. The risk is that larger platforms with more audience data and more inventory—particularly Google and Amazon—can replicate this capability faster than Pinterest can scale. 

Strategic Implications for Performance Marketers

Pinterest's TvScientific acquisition signals that performance marketing is expanding beyond digital-native channels into traditional media made measurable through technology infrastructure. For performance marketers, this means treating CTV with the same optimization rigor as search and social—testing audiences, measuring incremental lift, optimizing toward conversion metrics rather than reach proxies. It also means reevaluating budget allocation between digital and CTV based on performance data rather than historical precedent or channel categorization.

The brands that adapt fastest will be those that can integrate CTV data into existing attribution models and marketing mix optimization. This requires technical sophistication beyond what many marketing teams currently possess—data infrastructure to ingest CTV exposure data, identity resolution to connect exposures to conversions, and statistical methods to measure incremental lift across channels. These capabilities become table stakes rather than advanced techniques as CTV measurement reaches digital parity.

Master Cross-Channel Performance Marketing at The Academy of Continuing Education

Pinterest's acquisition of TvScientific represents more than one company's growth strategy—it signals performance marketing's expansion into channels that historically operated on brand metrics rather than conversion attribution. The marketers who thrive in this environment will understand how to optimize across search, social, and CTV from unified performance frameworks rather than managing channels in isolation.

Ready to build cross-channel performance capabilities that turn traditional media into measurable performance channels? Join The Academy of Continuing Education and develop the technical and strategic skills ambitious marketers need to succeed as performance marketing expands beyond digital-native channels.