Search vs. surf
Is someone more open to a sponsored idea when they're looking for something, or when they're just looking?
The question
Pinterest is used two ways. Sometimes a person searches for a specific thing. Sometimes they surf with no goal at all. The two feel different from the inside, and Pinterest wanted to know whether they were different for advertisers too.
Collect
In-lab sessions put participants into each mode in turn, with eye-tracking, facial coding and self-report capturing how they moved through the feed and how they reacted to sponsored pins along the way.
Analyze
Attention, emotion and recall were compared across the two modes, controlling for the content each person saw.
Present
The surf mode won. The serendipity of browsing without a goal left people more open to sponsored content than a directed search did, a finding Pinterest could take to advertisers in one sentence.