MAM
Pinning down the zeitgeist: WPP plugs Pinterest trends into its planning machine
NEW YORK: Trends used to take time. Now they arrive fully formed at breakfast and die by lunch. WPP Media has decided to stop chasing them manually and start piping them straight into the veins of its planning operation instead.
The media giant has struck a deal with Pinterest to embed Pinterest Trends directly into WPP Open, its proprietary planning platform. The integration makes WPP the first agency with bespoke API access to Pinterest’s trend data—essentially giving its planners and clients a cultural early-warning system that updates in real time.
“Culture moves fast, and trends can make or break a campaign,” says WPP Media executive vice president and global head of data and partnerships Amanda Grant. “The challenge isn’t just spotting what’s popular—it’s knowing what matters and moving at the speed of behaviour.”
Pinterest, where 500 million users actively search for inspiration rather than scroll passively, has become something of a crystal ball for marketers. People pin wedding themes six months out, Halloween costumes in August, and Christmas gift ideas before the turkey’s cold. That forward-looking intent makes Pinterest’s data particularly valuable for brands trying to get ahead of the curve rather than jump on bandwagons already rolling downhill.
Through the new integration in Open’s Strategic Insights module, WPP teams can now access trends without leaving their planning console. No more manual research. No more educated guesses about whether “cottagecore” is peaking or “clean girl aesthetic” is yesterday’s news. The system serves up search volumes, seasonality patterns, and trend evolution data, filtered by demographics, categories, keywords and what Pinterest calls “moments”—those cultural inflection points when something goes from niche to mainstream.
The partnership reflects a broader industry shift. As cultural relevance increasingly depends on speed—and algorithms decide what gets seen—agencies are racing to automate the insights that previously required armies of junior planners trawling Reddit and TikTok. WPP is betting that hardwiring Pinterest’s signals into its planning workflow will help clients spot opportunities before competitors do, and avoid backing trends that are already fading.
“Today, cultural relevance is shaped by two forces: the trends that spark ideas and the creator voices that amplify them,” Grant notes. The Pinterest integration tackles the former; presumably, humans still handle the latter.
Whether this turns WPP’s planners into trend-spotting savants or simply gives them better excuses when campaigns flop remains to be seen. But in a world where “brat summer” can dominate global marketing discourse for three months before vanishing entirely, having Pinterest whispering in your ear certainly beats guessing. After all, if you’re going to jump on a bandwagon, you might as well know which direction it’s heading—and how long before it crashes.
AD Agencies
Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
