As a member of Creative Excellence on the Global Creative Strategy team, I am an expert in all things design on Pinterest. Focusing on 3 key areas, I help our Sales Organization and Advertisers understand how to best create content for the platform. Through scaled content and programs, 1:1 partnerships with brands and cross functional projects, I work across a variety of industry verticals to help inspire people to lead the life they love.
1:1 Partnerships
The Creative Excellence team is responsible for running 2 workshops that directly educate advertising partners at Pinterest—Pin Creation, and Creative Optimization. In person or virtually, among other things we take our advertising partners through Creative Best Practices and an overview of ad formats on the platform. The workshops are interactive, and anywhere between 1 and 3 hours.
Each workshop is tailored to the specific needs of the advertiser. That includes custom Pins created for each workshop to illustrate just how brands should look and feel when following Pinterest’s Creative Best Practices. (To the right are some examples of previously workshop Pins.)
Beyond these workshops, writers and designers are also from time to time responsible for assisting Creative Strategists with executing other workshop offerings (such as campaign and big idea-centered ones) as part of these partnerships.
Pin Creation
In order to help our advertisers understand what we do and how we do it, at Pinterest, a large part of my work is in Pin Creation. These pins will be either branded for a specific brand’s up and coming campaign, or “generic” for a workshop or published piece of executive thought leadership. (For legal purposes, the Pin to the left is for the latter).
Through Pin Creation, we continue our mission of educating advertisers and our Sales Organization on Creative Best Practices on the platform.
Scaled Content + Executive Thought Leadership
I worked closely with Creative Strategists and Creative Leads who acted as various project’s Directly Responsible Individual (or, DRI) to design the overall look and feel for scaled content and thought leadership pieces that affected sales materials created by the entire Sales Organization and our Agency partners. These might be templates for pitch decks, whitepaper thought leadership pieces published on Pinterest’s business site to show our stance on ever-evolving tech, or programs to help inform our overall organization how creative can be elevated on the platform.
An example of these would be our Creative Agency Toolkit (left). Having a scalable and modular design template allowed the Creative Strategists to move faster to achieve their Creative Agency goal.
Cross functional projects
On a number of occasions, I have acted as the Creative Strategy or Design point person on cross functional projects. This work has me teaming up with people across different organizations for a specific cause.
The Pinterest Shop is a quarterly shopping edit curated by Pinterest of small business we’re looking to highlight. For 2020, I have designed all board covers, house ads and marketing collateral for 3 of these shopping edits. Most notably, the edit that launched in August 2020, focusing on black-owned small businesses was picked up by ABCNews.com, AdWeek, and Popsugar, among others.
Another passion cross functional project of mine has been helping to launch Pinterest’s Creators initiative. Focused on bringing creators (both low profile, and celebrity) to the platform, I designed the program’s strategy and segmentation deck, as well as template one-sheeters unique to each creator, and worked with some of the original creators who signed up to join the fun. Furthermore, I designed a series of Pins for the Chefs @ Home project that launched our Creators program which aimed to help support members of the food service industry during COVID-19. This specific project was done in coordination with ROAR, the National Restaurant Association, Harlem Grown, and No Kid Hungry