• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, July 27, 2016

By now, Pinterest has pretty well proven its value to brands. But, there’s always room for improvement.

With that in mind, the pin-sharing platform just scored Gunnard Johnson to head measurement science and insights.

If you don’t know Johnson, he's sort of a star in the field. With more than 20 years in the business, he most recently served as head of quantitative ads research at Snapchat. Prior to that, Gunnard was the advertising research director for Google, where he led the Americas team and influenced Google’s push into brand measurement.

At Pinterest, Gunnard is tasked with growing the existing measurement and insights programs that drive ROI for brand partners.

This, says Gunnard, shouldn’t be a problem. “I see the growth potential being tremendous, as the unique insights created from people discovering and bringing ideas to life on Pinterest should deliver a superior advertising ROI.”

For Pinterest, the hire is part of a broader effort to sell brands on its potential. This spring, it enlisted Millward Brown Digital to do just that.

Among other tools, Millward Brown’s Brand Lift Insights offering is now measuring the impact of Pinterest brand campaigns.

Specifically, it’s designed to help brands figure out how Promoted Pins shift consumer brand perceptions, and the degree to which consumers become more aware of brands after being exposed to Promoted Pins.

Pinterest also recently took the opportunity to show off some impressive findings.

In one study, Walgreens experienced a higher than 15% lift in positive brand perception, brand favorability, and purchase intent for a key category among a targeted audience of females age 18-24. 

In another, conducted for L’Oréal, the brand saw an 18% lift in new product awareness for its new Lumi Highlighter makeup product, as well as a 27% lift in message association, and 25% lift in purchase intent.

Partly as a result of these impressive figures, Pinterest’s business prospects are looking bright. Indeed, the image-based social network reportedly expects to rake in $3 billion in revenue in 2018. If accurate, that would be dramatically higher than the roughly $100 million in revenue Pinterest reportedly took in last year.