Pinterest has poached Spotify’s director of sales, Beth Horn, to be its UK managing director.
Horn will be responsible for leading Pinterest’s sales strategy and execution in the UK, including heading the sales team and supporting relationships with advertisers.
She begins on 24 June and will report to Milka Privodanova, Pinterest’s vice-president, head of EMEA sales.
There has been no permanent UK leader at Pinterest since Privodanova, who was previously country manager, UK, Ireland, Netherlands and Nordics, was promoted to her current position in June 2023. Most recently, Clement Schvartz has been serving as interim UK MD.
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At Spotify, which she joined in December 2023, Horn looked after retail, beauty, travel, tech, mobility and dating partnerships. Before that, she spent more than 12 years at Meta, primarily working in retail and ecommerce client relationships.
“I am thrilled to join and lead the Pinterest UK sales team at this exciting moment, taking our positive corner of the internet and helping to drive full-funnel results for the clients and partners we serve,” said Horn.
Privodanova added: “This is a new era for Pinterest as we transform the platform for an unbeatable shopping experience and strive to be the industry’s ultimate full-funnel solution.
“Beth, a proven leader with experience of building high-performing teams to deliver outstanding results for clients, is ideally positioned to help us tell this story and continue to scale our growing business in the UK.”
The appointment comes amid Pinterest’s attempts to stake out a unique position among social media companies with agencies and advertisers. In particular, Pinterest has sought to distinguish itself as a more positive experience than its competitors and one that can increasingly cover the full marketing funnel.
One such recent attempt to woo agencies was its annual advertiser summit in London, Pinvision, which took place this month. Attendees were guided through an “experiential tour” of how they can engage with the platform’s suite of performance tools.
In a recent episode of The Media Leader Podcast, Privodanova explained that users increasingly come to Pinterest for the purpose of shopping and that the platform has “opened the shop” to make it easier for users to find and buy products and for brands to advertise.
“We work with all advertisers, whether they’re big or small,” she said. “In a way, we see a democratisation of the marketplace in the shopping environment. It doesn’t matter if you’re a big advertiser or a small advertiser — if you have a product that users like, we will show that product and ultimately that will lead to a good positive consumer experience.”
Privodanova noted that Pinterest is in a good position to benefit from the eventual full deprecation of cookies as it has “very strong signals from our users”, adding: “We don’t have to know what they’re doing elsewhere, because they tell us what they’re interested in.”
In its latest earnings, Pinterest achieved its fastest revenue and user growth since 2021, with a year-on-year increase in revenue of 23% to $740m and rise in monthly active users of 12% to 518m.