Pinterest Personas
Bespoke Persona Generation · Production Targeting Algorithm · Pinterest
Problem
Advertisers could not target the kinds of granular, behavior-based audiences that actually described how people used Pinterest. Keyword and interest targeting left a wide gap — too broad for niche audiences, too shallow in signal. Manual analysis produced interesting decks, but there was a hard ceiling on how many advertisers could benefit and how quickly those insights could refresh.
Insight
Personas fill the gap between keyword and interest targeting. By analyzing more signals over longer lookback windows, they surface stable niche audiences that neither approach can reach. The constraint was not analyst time — it was the representation of people. Cluster behavioral signals into interpretable personas rather than declared attributes, and you unlock entirely new ways to buy media.
Approach
I treated audience definition as an unsupervised learning and product design problem. I built behavioral embedding spaces, experimented with clustering (including HDBScan-style approaches), and personified the resulting clusters so they made sense to sales, product, and advertisers. An Automated Insights Report distills each persona's distinctive characteristics — giving advertisers the language to understand and activate who they're reaching. I then worked with partners to turn those personas into internal tools and, eventually, a full audience product — all without a formal initial mandate.
Impact
What started as a passion project became a production product powering advertiser audience strategy. Personas now support campaigns across global brands and categories and reshaped how we talk about Pinterest's value to the market.
- $80M+ incremental annual revenue attributable to personas
- >10K new personas generated annually
- Adoption across global advertisers and internal sales teams
- Spawned follow-on work in behavioral audience modeling
