The Discovery Shifts Every Marketer Must Watch

Meta has published a short Festive Season guide on how to make best use of its click-to-message ads, outlining best practices, creative tips, and key dates. This is to help advertisers maximise performance from Click-to-Message campaigns, which have driven more than 40% year-on-year revenue growth.

The guide shows how brands can use WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram to turn interest into real-time conversations, nurture warmer leads and drive faster conversions during peak shopping periods.

With consumers increasingly comfortable engaging via DMs, Meta is encouraging advertisers to align campaigns with seasonal moments, personalise creative, and streamline the customer journey through chat-first experiences.

With messaging now central to how people discover, consider and buy, Click-to-Message ads are quickly becoming a powerful way to drive faster, more meaningful customer interactions and reflects Meta’s broader push to make direct, message-driven engagement a key part of its advertising strategy.

• DMs are becoming a core conversion channel. Not just for support, but for discovery and purchases.
• Holiday periods are ideal for testing messaging ads, as users expect faster, more personalised responses.
• Website-to-message formats can capture warmer intent, letting users explore before initiating contact.
• Creative needs to feel conversational, not overly polished or sales-heavy.
• WhatsApp’s growth makes it a priority channel, especially for markets where it’s the dominant messaging app.
• Planning matters. Aligning campaigns with key retail dates can significantly improve results.
• Opportunity to shorten the funnel by moving users directly from ad → conversation → conversion.

Pinterest is broadening its AI offering with its new “Pinterest Assistant”, a new AI-powered, visual-first shopping companion designed to make discovering products more intuitive and personalised.

The tool acts like a virtual stylist or interior designer, helping users find items that match their taste through conversation instead of search. The Assistant delivers tailored recommendations by analysing users’ boards, saves and behaviour, alongside insights from Pinterest’s nearly 600 million monthly active users. From finding outfits for a first date to home décor inspiration, Pinterest Assistant is designed to turn browsing into highly personalised, AI-driven discovery. 

Pinterest Assistant stands out with its visual-first AI, using real-time conversations and first-party user signals to deliver highly relevant visual inspiration and shoppable products. By expanding multimodal search, Pinterest now allows seamless movement between images, voice and text, creating a more natural, intuitive shopping experience.

Users can even accompany their selected image with a spoken prompt, giving the assistant all the information it needs to search for their desired product and making product discovery on Pinterest becoming closer than ever to how people actually shop in real life.

On top of this, Pinterest has given the system the ability to understand open-ended questions, such as “what do you think” – which means users can enjoy up-to-date fashion and beauty advice right in the app. 

• Greater demand for high-quality visuals. Visual-first AI puts even more weight on strong, scroll-stopping creative.
• Richer first-party data targeting. Pinterest is leaning heavily on users’ saved content and behaviours to personalise recommendations.
• New discovery moments. Brands can appear earlier in the journey through conversational, voice and image-led searches.
• More “inspiration-led” shopping. Products will be surfaced based on style, mood and context, not just keywords.
• Higher intent traffic. Users interacting via AI-assisted discovery are likely to be warmer and closer to purchase.
• Creative needs to be AI-friendly. Clear product visuals, angles and lifestyle context will help products get picked up by the assistant.
• Opportunities to test new ad formats early. Early adopters of visual and multimodal placements could gain a competitive edge.
• Stronger role for Pinterest in upper-funnel strategy. The platform is becoming more powerful for discovery and consideration, not just inspiration.

The feature allows users to track and compare their account against up to ten competitors, with side-by-side views of core metrics such as follower growth and posting frequency. Users can view some individual post performance (even when like counts are hidden), but the feature lacks deeper insights like trend graphs, group benchmarking or advanced performance data.

As a result, its value may be limited for marketers focused on outcomes like clicks and conversions, thus doesn’t fully reflect true performance.

While the tool is currently fairly basic and limited to top-level stats, it marks an important first step for accounts looking to better understand their position in the market and monitor competitor performance.