Dream now,
Travel later.
We created an interactive Pin Extension that let users design their dream vacation during lockdown, generating personalized travel boards saved to their profiles, which we reactivated once borders reopened.
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​🛠Product Problem
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Pinterest’s standard Pin format offered no way to guide users through a personalized, goal-oriented experience,limiting engagement depth and preventing travel partners from activating real behavior.
💬 Campaign Problem
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When COVID-19 brought travel to a standstill, Pinterest risked becoming a place of passive longing rather than active inspiration, especially for brands in the tourism space.​
At the center was a bespoke Pin Extension, Pinterest’s interactive format that allowed us to build a lightweight product layer inside the platform. Users could design their ideal Swiss vacation by clicking through curated prompts.
Based on their selections, we dynamically generated native Pinterest boards, pre-filled with personalized ideas and saved to their profiles—seeding a behavior Pinterest was already known for: saving dreams for later.
When travel resumed months later, we closed the behavioral loop: we re-engaged the original participants with a nudge to revisit their saved boards and act on their travel dreams.
This two-phase interaction, from dreaming to doing, was a unique expression of Pinterest’s product purpose.
These boards did more than personalize the experience—they became organic content engines. We repurposed the most inspiring user-generated boards into public inspiration streams, reaching even those who hadn’t engaged with the original tool.
When travel resumed months later, we closed the behavioral loop: we re-engaged the original participants with a nudge to revisit their saved boards and act on their travel dreams. This two-phase interaction—from dreaming to doing—was a unique expression of Pinterest’s product purpose.
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What made this project groundbreaking was not just the UX, but the business model behind it. We co-developed the experience using advertiser funding, effectively turning media budget into product investment. It was the first time at Pinterest Europe that:
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An advertiser-funded product integration was built from scratch
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The custom Pin Extension format became a repeatable template
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The success of this pilot enabled us to scale the format across EMEA, unlocking a new commercial and creative model for future partners
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80% completion rate on the interactive Pin Extension
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31.5 seconds avg. time spent, significantly above benchmark
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+18% board generation rate vs. all previous Pin Extension campaigns
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1000+ personalized boards created, many reused as public inspiration
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Campaign ran across 5 key markets with interest- and keyword-based targeting
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Featured in international press as a model for engaging brand storytelling in a lockdown worl