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RIYADH: Pinterest recorded more than 1 billion searches in ����ֱ�� last year, with most linked to lifestyle, retail and travel, the company’s chief revenue officer Bill Watkins told Arab News.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Athar Festival in Riyadh, with which Arab News is a media partner, Watkins described the Kingdom as a strategic market where the platform’s global momentum intersects with the ambitions of Vision 2030.

“I think about the population here … the fact that the population is 60 percent Gen Z. Again, Gen Z on Pinterest, it’s our largest, our fastest-growing and our most engaged audience,” he said.

Over the past eight quarters, Pinterest has reached record highs in users, now totaling almost 600 million people globally. Watkins said that the Gen Z cohort has become the heart of the company’s expansion strategy.

Watkins said this demographic alignment places ����ֱ�� at the center of Pinterest’s long-term outlook. “I just think that presents such an opportunity for us to work together and help grow businesses here in ����ֱ��,” he said.

Pinterest’s relevance to ����ֱ��’s transformation, he added, lies in the country’s nationwide shift toward lifestyle, retail and tourism investment.

“People come to Pinterest to plan what they’re going to do next, around categories such as food, fashion, home, beauty and travel.

“When you think about what the country is aiming to do around lifestyle, retail and tourism investment, it’s very aligned.”

He added that 96 percent of searches on Pinterest are unbranded, meaning users arrive without preconceived choices, and are searching for ideas rather than products.

“They know that they’re going to travel, but they don’t yet know exactly what they’re going to do or where they’re going to go,” he said.

Watkins cited Red Sea Global as an example of how Saudi companies are using Pinterest to reach potential visitors before travel decisions are finalized.

“They came onto the platform inspiring our users early on in their travel decision-making journey, really to showcase the amazing luxury experiences that they had to offer,” Watkins said.

The results, he added, exceeded industry averages. The Red Sea Global campaign achieved a 74 percent higher engagement rate than Pinterest’s travel-sector benchmark and a 67 percent lower cost for the brand.

Pinterest sees an opportunity to harness its vast data network to help Saudi businesses anticipate trends.

“We have over 500 billion pins or objects from the web that have been organized into over 10 billion collections,” he said. “We’re able to find incredible insights of what people are going to do.”

This dataset, known as the Pinterest Taste Graph, underpins the company’s artificial-intelligence tools. Watkins said its AI-driven advertising solution has delivered an average 20 percent increase in return on ad spend for clients worldwide.

“Search on Pinterest has quadrupled over the last eight quarters,” he said. “In a world where search is being completely disrupted with the advent of Gen AI, search on Pinterest is growing.”

Pinterest has published a “Pinterest Predicts” which forecasts cultural and consumer trends based on platform activity.

“We can tell you what is going to trend in the future,” Watkins said. “Of all of the trends that we predicted, eight out of 10 — or 80 percent — of the time those predictions come true.”

In ����ֱ��, the data already points to distinct shifts in taste. “Across these billion searches that we’re seeing in KSA alone, we’re seeing that workplace design is trending very significantly on the platform,” Watkins said.

He added that such insights can help local brands “get ahead of the opportunity to create demand in sales and top-line growth.”

Watkins underlined Pinterest’s wider international push. More than 80 percent of its 600 million global users are outside the US, and the platform now reaches more than 30 percent of the online population in the Middle East.

RIYADH: The third annual Athar Festival began the first of its two days in Riyadh on Tuesday at the Diriyah Biennale Foundation’s headquarters in the Jax District.

The festival’s chairman Ian Fairservice spoke to Arab News, which is the event’s media partner, to discuss the improvements over previous years, the significance of its workshop and panel lineup, and what people can get out of visiting.

Fairservice said: “We’re occupying three times the area that we previously occupied, and we have 46 activations, and five different stages, from the relatively small to enormous.

“We have just under 3,000 delegates, and we have a very, very busy program with over 200 speakers providing 100 hours of content.

“This is similar to the size that Dubai Lynx achieved in about (18) years. We've achieved this here in the Kingdom in just the third year.”

The main exhibition hall is filled with big-time industry players such as Snapchat, Pinterest and HungerStation, along with workshop areas and multiple main stages.

The full-day program covers everything from shaping the future of creativity to the logistics of expanding businesses.

Fairservice added: “If people are going to give up two days, we want to make sure that we give them a lot of options.”

Through the Athar app, visitors can personalize their visit through scheduling tools and search for specific speakers and company events.

Fairservice said: “We hope that people will use those tools … I’ve seen one example already: some companies have produced a program for their colleagues saying ‘this is what we recommend. This is your recommended schedule’.”

The festival’s session lineup was curated through an open call. Speakers sent in their propositions, from which a lot of insight and information was drawn from the Athar team.

Fairservice said: “Now, the most topical subject that people want to talk about is going to be related to AI, gaming, especially gaming here in the Kingdom, because it’s probably one of the fastest, if not the fastest-growing pastimes, which is all down to the fact that the demographic is so young and so tech savvy.”

As ����ֱ�� invests heavily in the gaming sector, the Saudi Gamer Arena at the festival is a hub for the future of the industry.

“We’ve got to be looking all the time at future technologies whilst also respecting the other silos because there are so many different silos in our communication world today,” Fairservice said.

Youth participation is a prominent topic of discussion. With more than 70 percent of the Saudi population being under the age of 40, brands are increasingly investing in future creatives.

This can be seen at Athar as students and young people fill the stages and exhibition hall.

Publicis Groupe MENA’s Chief Innovation and Growth Officer Jennifer Fischer spoke at a session titled “Vibe Check to Brand Check: What Saudi Youth Want,” while interactive sessions like “Intergenerational Gaming: Me, My Father, and I” highlight how gaming is becoming a bridge across generations and a family activity.

But with the fast-changing pace in the creative industry, one may wonder where the older generations fit in.

Fairservice said: “I have great experience of being part of the older generation, and it’s just as important for me to be keeping up to date as it is for Gen Z.

“I don’t look at age as a factor, really. If you are in the industry, then you’re in the industry. It really doesn’t matter whether you’re a male or a female, whether you’re a Saudi, or an American, or an Indian national — and it doesn’t matter whether you’re 25 or 65 at the end of the day.

“I think everybody wants to learn and experience what’s new and upcoming in our industry.”

Athar is primarily built as a networking space, and as vice chairman of the event Mohamed Al-Ayed said, it is a place for “human connection,” one of the most important elements of the festival.

Fairservice said: “Somebody asked me the other day the strangest question. They asked, with the advent of AI, if exhibitions and conferences were going to be necessary in future. I thought that was so sad; what a terrible question to ask.

“Just because you’ve got AI and you’ve got information at your fingertips, which is sometimes very accurate and sometimes very questionable, it doesn’t mean that you can do away with this atmosphere that we’ve got here.

“People meeting people, networking, and listening, having meals, panels — it’s exciting. It’s a lot more exciting than staring at a screen.”