Ross Jauncey, APAC Brand Studio Lead, Pinterest
In today’s messy media landscape, marketers are facing a strange paradox. We’ve never had more channels, more data or more tools at our fingertips – yet building campaigns that actually work across the full funnel feels harder than ever.
A big part of the problem? Too many strategies are still built for a simpler era. A time when you could standardise creative, slice up a media plan and call it a day.
That world’s gone. Hanging onto that approach is quietly killing performance.
If we want meaningful results now, we have to rethink how we build campaigns from the ground up – so they’re native to each platform, use formats that genuinely earn attention, and are constantly refined through data. In other words: design for how people actually behave, not how our media plans look on a slide.
In my view, that only happens when you build platform-first campaigns.
The wrong assumption
When we take the same ad and run it across all platforms in the same way, we’re betting that a shiny 6-second pre-roll will somehow hit the mark everywhere.
We’re betting that someone aimlessly scrolling on the couch is in the same mindset as someone actively planning a renovation, a holiday or a major purchase.
We’re betting that platform mechanics and cultures are interchangeable.
They’re not.
Over the past few years, I’ve watched the best brands crack a different code. They build creative for context, not just for distribution. They obsess over how people use each platform, not just who’s there, but why they’re there, what they’re trying to do and what’s going on in their heads.
And funnily enough, when you start there, performance follows.
Tapping into the intent economy
This becomes even more important on intent-led platforms.
Here, people aren’t just killing time. They’re arriving with a purpose, and that purpose completely changes how they engage with content.
On Pinterest, people come to plan, to dream and explore ideas, and to make decisions about their future. Our data shows most searches are unbranded, which means people are genuinely open to discovering new brands before they’ve formed a preference.
That’s gold for marketers – but only if we respect the context.
When someone’s in an inspiration and planning mindset, they’re far more receptive to content that helps them along that journey. Show them something useful, relevant and on-tone for the environment, and they’ll lean in. Drop something that feels like an interruption, and they’ll swipe right past it.
Our job is to show up in that “sweet spot” with content that feels organic to the experience, not bolted on. Native, not generic.
So how does that connect to the full-funnel performance we’re all chasing?
Full-funnel isn’t linear anymore
We all know the classic funnel model: awareness, consideration, conversion. It suggests people move neatly from one step to the next.
That’s not how it works anymore.
Today, people bounce around. They discover a brand, research it, compare options and take action – often in a single session, especially when intent is already high.
That’s why joining your upper- and lower-funnel activity has become non-negotiable. If you treat them as separate worlds, you lose momentum. When you connect them, you create a clean path from “this is interesting” to “I’m in, let’s go”.
A recent campaign we ran with Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) for the Land Rover Discovery is a good example.
We built native creative specifically for Pinterest, paired it with premium formats, and constantly optimised based on what we were seeing in the data. The whole campaign was designed around how people actually plan and discover on the platform.
By letting upper-funnel awareness activity work hand-in-hand with lower-funnel conversion tactics, the campaign delivered a 9x higher conversion rate compared with running those stages in isolation.
That’s not a marginal gain. That’s the difference between a campaign that just washes its face and one that delivers real business impact.
Designing for what’s next
The future of full-funnel marketing isn’t about choosing between awareness or conversion. It’s not even about choosing between platforms.
It’s about designing campaigns that can do both – intelligently, intentionally and natively – inside the realities of each environment.
That doesn’t mean building completely different campaigns for every platform. That’s expensive, unsustainable and unrealistic for most teams.
It does mean starting with a sharper question: how does my audience actually use this platform, and what are they trying to achieve when they’re here?
From an industry perspective, this shift is crucial. As targeting and optimisation tools become more standardised, creative is fast becoming the key lever for both differentiation and performance. The campaigns that win are the ones that align with platform behaviour – they earn attention, drive deeper engagement and, ultimately, deliver stronger outcomes.
The brands that master this won’t just beat their benchmarks. They’ll reset what “good” looks like in their category. And they’ll do it not by shouting louder, but by designing creative that mirrors the way people really discover, explore and decide.