Jewelry retailer Zales is enlisting mobile to link an ad in an upcoming issue of Cosmopolitan magazine to its Pinterest page as a way to drive engagement for its products and, ultimately, sales.

The Pinterest site focuses on enabling users to share content on the Web, with many retailers having embraced it as tool for showcasing their products by letting users pin items that they like. In the Zales execution, readers who scan the image on the printed page are taken to the Zales Pinterest page, where they see images of variety earrings, rings and other jewelry items and can click through to the retailer’s online site to purchase an item.

“Traditionally, when you take a picture and pin it, the image links back to you only,” said Ed Knudson, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Digimarc, Beaverton, OR.

“If you repin or pin using our Print-to-Pin offering, the image maintains the brand owner’s desired payoff for additional information – ie. the photo of the tuna casserole can link through to the recipe and shopping list and the NIKE shoes can link to an online ordering form or nearest retail outlet,” he said.

Integration point
The Pinterest integration is being enabled by Digimarc’s Print-to-Pin solution, which enables readers to pin images from printed materials.

A recent study from comScore found that Pinterest is the fastest-growing social media site with a year-over-year growth of more than 4377 percent.

With the number of consumers growing who are accessing social sites such as Pinterest from their mobile devices, Pinterest is also proving to be an important integration point for mobile, social and commerce.

Redbook is also integrating with Pinterest in its July issue.

To leverage this growth, Cosmopolitan has watermarked certain editorial and advertising pages in its September issue so when readers scan the page with their mobile phone using the Digimarc app, they will be taken directly to a related page on Pinterest.

Readers will be able to pin a featured image to their pinboard, re-pin images and follow the brand.

An icon on the printed page lets readers know which pages are scannable.

Direct connection
Print-to-pin is proving to be popular with women’s magazines as a way for readers to continue their engagement with content that they like, whether it is a recipe, a product or a brand.

Redbook is also using the Print-to-Pin solution to facilitate a direct connection from print to Pinterest in its July issue, which is currently available.

Redbook placed multiple watermarks on a single editorial page that features pictures of fashion accessories. When an item is scanned using the Digimarc app, the reader is linked to the high-resolution image of that item to pin on their chosen pinboard.

House Beautiful was the first to use the Print-to-Pin solution in its June issue.

“Now a beautiful dress or photograph from the pages of the magazine can be easily re-pinned on Pinterest,” Mr. Knudsen said.

“One of the core value-adds of our solution is the pinned image maintains a link back to the publication’s or advertiser’s online entity,” he said. “Before Print-to-Pin, the reader would need to take multiple steps – take a photo of the page and pin – and the publication and/or brand’s source information would not be included.”

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York