A picture is worth a thousand searches, according to Target and Pinterest in a joint keynote at Advertising Week today, where they unveiled their partnership on a powerful piece of visual search technology.
Pinterest’s image discovery platform, called Lens, has been available since February, but their partnership with Target will allow users to act more quickly on their impulses.
“Snap a picture of something that inspires you, and get a curated list of everything at Target.com that matches,” explained Rick Gomez, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Target.
The technology, which is based on Pinterest’s Taste Graph categorization platform, uses computer vision to assign attributes to photographed products and displays products with matching or similar features.
Gomez stated that the partnership will allow Target to reach consumers even earlier in the purchase funnel, citing that 97 percent of product queries on Pinterest lack any mention of a brand.
Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s president, lamented the recent hardships of physical retailers, claiming that the growth of e-commerce has diminished the fun of the shopping experience. Beyond just bringing back the magic of discovery, Kendall asserted that Lens-based visual search tools will only grow in importance.
“Humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text,” he said. “Visual input and visual output . . . it’s the future.”
When asked about further plans for the partnership, Kendall said he’d like Pinterest’s platform to influence Target’s product development based on trends among its users.
Also in attendance at the keynote: the real Bullseye and a host of plush doppelgangers.
“With change comes opportunity,” Gomez said. “How do we shorten the distance between inspiration and purchase?”
