Pinterest taps Amazon for global CMO role

Pinterest has recruited Claudine Cheever from Amazon to take on the global CMO role, as her predecessor Andréa Mallard moves to lead marketing at Microsoft AI.

Cheever joins from her role as Amazon’s vice-president for global brand and marketing, a position she has held for almost five years, having been at Amazon for nine. Before that, she worked agency side, at businesses including Saatchi & Saatchi and McCann.

Cheever says she was attracted to Pinterest as the platform “stands apart from other social and search platforms”.

“People come to Pinterest to save, curate, evolve their interests, and shop. That’s not just inspiring. It’s fundamentally different,” she says.

She succeeds Mallard, who was Pinterest’s first CMO and held the top marketing job for more than seven years. She joined Microsoft AI as CMO earlier this month and says she will be shaping what she terms “responsible AI that serves humanity” there.

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She describes AI as “the most consequential technological shift” of her lifetime, and says, “we have an enormous responsibility to get this right.”

During her time leading the marketing function at Pinterest, the platform has upped its focus on brand advertising, as well as having increasingly positioned itself as a place to shop. Pinterest now reaches 600 million monthly active users.

Cheever joins Pinterest as the platform faces what it describes as “the age of AI and performance marketing”. Pinterest has been investing in AI capabilities, including through AI-powered board updates, its recommendation tool Pinterest Assistant and visual search tools.

For her part, Cheever is credited with having launched AI-powered products during her time at Amazon, including Alexa.

In addition to Cheever’s appointment, Pinterest has also announced the creation of a chief business officer role, to which it has appointed former DoorDash and Spotify executive Lee Brown.

Brown’s role will bring together “content, ads product marketing, programmatic and customer operations […] all under one leader”, Pinterest said.