Every social media platform runs campaigns telling you to spend more time on their app. Pinterest just ran one telling you to put your phone down and go live your life. It is the most counterintuitive campaign in tech marketing right now, and it is working precisely because no other platform can copy it.
The Film
At the centre of the campaign is a 60-second film titled “How did they do it?”, produced entirely in-house by Pinterest’s House of Creative. The film stitches together old home movies and family photos sourced from Pinterest employees’ own archives, deliberately evoking a pre-social media era defined by spontaneity and real-world experiences.
A child’s voiceover asks the kind of questions that land harder than they first appear: how did they know they liked something if the thing hadn’t already gotten any likes? How did they know who they were without the rest of the world telling them? The film closes with the on-screen line: “The best thing you can find online is a reason to go offline.”
A 30-second cut-down and additional creative assets roll out from May 1 across TV, cinema, out-of-home, and digital channels. The campaign marks the first major work under new Pinterest CMO Claudine Cheever.
The Coachella Activation
The film alone would have been a brand statement. Pinterest went further and built physical proof of it.
At Coachella this year, Pinterest ran what it describes as the first-ever phone-free festival activation. Festivalgoers were asked to lock their phones in Yondr pouches before entering a colourful on-site space where visitors made custom charms, personalised postcards to mail home, and got festival makeup touch-ups from partner E.l.f. Cosmetics.
The activation, called “Joyride,” was carefully designed to feel like a colourful oasis, a space to reconnect with an inner child who notices the world beyond a screen. Without any content creation. No stories. Nothing is optimised for the algorithm. At a festival where most brand activations exist entirely to generate social media posts, Pinterest built one that deliberately did not.
The concept grew from specific platform data: Gen Z searches on Pinterest for “analogue aesthetic” are up 260% year-on-year, and searches for “dumb phone” have risen 150%. Pinterest did not invent the cultural shift. It read it and built a campaign around it.
Why Only Pinterest Can Run This Campaign
Sara Pollack, VP and global head of consumer marketing at Pinterest, said the platform’s algorithm is not built to get users to scroll hours of their lives away. It is built to inspire them to create a more meaningful real life, one they genuinely want to go out and live.
That distinction matters commercially. Pinterest’s revenue comes from intent: people searching for things they want to do, find, make, or buy. The highest-value Pinterest user is not the most addicted. It is the most intentional. “Go offline and do the thing you came here to plan” is not counter to the business model. It is the business model.
Meta cannot say this. TikTok cannot say this. Both are built on time-on-platform metrics and engagement loops that require continuous scrolling to function. Pinterest’s architecture is different, which is what makes the campaign structurally defensible rather than just creatively bold.
The Context It Sits In
Last month, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and YouTube liable for intentionally making their platforms addictive. The verdict arrived as Pinterest was finalising this campaign.
According to YouGov, nearly half of all Americans say they spend too much time on social media, with that figure rising to 66% among 18 to 29-year-olds. A 2025 Talk Research study found 63% of Gen Z consciously unplugged from devices, while 52% attempted to quit social media last year. Pinterest is not concerned about screen time. It is stepping into a conversation that already existed and staking out the clearest position available to it.
CEO Bill Ready has also recently called on governments to ban social media for children under 16, a public stance that reinforces the campaign’s message well beyond any paid media buy.
The campaign does not need to convince anyone that too much social media is harmful. That argument has already been made in courtrooms, in parliament buildings, and in millions of private conversations. Pinterest’s job here is simpler: show up as the one platform that is not part of the problem.
Campaign Name: “How did they do it?”
Agency Name: Pinterest House of Creative (in-house)
Brand Name: Pinterest
Location: United States, United Kingdom, Germany
