Pinterest may not be as popular among Gen Z as TikTok and Instagram, but the platform has nevertheless experienced a kind of renaissance with the coveted demographic this year. And several brands, including Walmart, are leaning into Pinterest and its Gen Z user base to drive sales.
Gen Z—or those born between 1997 and 2012—is currently Pinterest’s fastest-growing age demographic by far, growing roughly 20% year-over-year compared to a growth rate of 8% across all Pinterest users, said Sydney Stanback, the platform’s senior manager of ads and trends research. The age cohort now makes up 42% of the 482 million monthly active users on Pinterest across the globe, meaning just under 200 million Gen Zers are logging into the platform at least once a month, she added.
Brands including La Roche-Posay, PacSun and Walmart are targeting that goldmine of Gen Z consumers on Pinterest. All three brands are capitalizing on the young consumers’ affinity for shoppable social content and the fashion and lifestyle aesthetics, or “cores,” around which those consumers base their identity—and their purchases.
“Pinterest is really critical for us now to engage with Gen Z,” said Thomas Calhoun, VP of e-commerce at PacSun. “You could argue that reaching Gen Z can be done on Instagram or TikTok, but it's way harder on those platforms to capture this specific intent that [Gen Z] has on Pinterest.”