Pinterest published guidance on September 29, 2026 urging advertisers to rework festive creative for the week between Christmas and New Year, a period the industry calls Q5. According to Pinterest, 1 in 2 monthly Pinterest users in Europe continue shopping in the weeks after the festive season, and ad groups carrying 5 to 10 ads are correlated with a 2.7% increase in return on ad spend compared to the global average. The post, published on the UK edition of Pinterest Business, cites a Q5 campaign by travel group TUI in Germany that reached 41% more people with Premiere Spotlight placements than its annual average. The nine footnotes that would show where those figures come from are collapsed in the published page and could not be read.

In Short

Pinterest wrote a guide telling advertisers that people do not stop shopping after Christmas, they just start buying things for themselves instead of gifts. That matters to brands that switch their ads off in late December or leave Christmas ads running, because Pinterest says both choices miss what shoppers want in that week. The guide asks brands to swap gift and deadline messages for pictures of products in everyday use, and points to its own tools for doing that cheaply, though it does not show where most of its numbers come from.

What Pinterest published

The post appeared in the "Best practices" category of the Pinterest Business blog, English (UK) edition, dated 29 September 2026. Its on-page headline reads "How to refresh your creative for Q5", while the browser title captured with the page reads "How to Reset Your Creative for Q5", a minor inconsistency that suggests the headline was edited after the page metadata was set. The copy reviewed for this article is a single-page print of the post captured on October 11, 2026.

It arrived one week after another Pinterest Business post, "Festive campaign panic? Pinterest has you covered", dated 22 September 2026, which appears in the page's "Recent" rail tagged as news, best practices and product updates. The Q5 guide is the second festive-season planning document the company has put out in eight days.

The argument rests on a single framing sentence: "Q5 is not only a budget decision. It's a creative one." Pinterest describes the choice advertisers usually make after the festive season as binary. "After the festive season, advertisers face a simple choice: keep the same campaign running or turn it off," the post states, adding that "assets are already live, teams are tired and no one wants to brief a whole new campaign for a short window."

Pinterest's case is that neither option fits. According to the company, the week between Christmas and New Year's "is a high-engagement period, driven by increased searches." The post attaches footnote 1 to that statement. It gives no search volume, no percentage increase and no comparison period in the body text.

A narrower definition of Q5

Pinterest defines Q5 as "the week between Christmas and New Year's." That is a tighter window than others in the industry use. When Meta published Q5 guidance for mobile game developers in October 2025, PPC Land described the period as running from late December through mid-January, a stretch in which competition in ad auctions often drops because larger brands leave once shipping deadlines pass. Meta's guidance said cost per thousand impressions fell to its lowest seasonal levels during that window and that cost per acquisition dropped below pre-Cyber 5 benchmarks, though it gave no percentages.

The Pinterest post does not mention auction prices at all. It makes no claim about cheaper inventory or reduced competition after Christmas, which is the argument most often used to justify Q5 spending. Its pitch is about relevance instead: shoppers are still active, but they want different things.

Three shifts in what shoppers want

The core of the post is a set of three "Q5 shifts", each presented with an arrow-style summary and a "creative cue".

From gifting to self-purchase

The first shift is summarised as "Gift for them → buy for yourself." According to Pinterest, "after weeks of buying for friends, family and loved ones, people start turning their attention back to themselves and thinking about what they want and need next."

Pinterest then splits the shift by category, attaching a separate footnote to each:

  • Beauty moves "from festive finishing touches to 'new year, new me' planning and fresh-start maintenance" (footnote 2).
  • Food and drink "bridges one last celebration with healthier routines" (footnote 3).
  • Fashion "leaves party dressing behind for January-ready style" (footnote 4).
  • Home "moves from seasonal mood to comfort, function and everyday ease" (footnote 5).

None of the four category statements is accompanied by a figure in the body text. Each footnote presumably points to Pinterest search or trend data, but with the footnotes collapsed in the published page, the scale of each shift, and the markets measured, cannot be checked. The creative cue for this section reads: "Show how the product fits the buyer's own life, not someone else's wishlist."

From celebration to planning

The second shift is "Festive celebration → new year planning." Pinterest is careful here not to argue for stripping Christmas from creative entirely. "Q5 isn't the moment to pack away every last trace of Christmas," the post states. "People are still celebrating, but they're also starting to anticipate the reset of the new year."

This section carries the only named advertiser in the guide, and its two numbered results.

TUI's German campaign

According to Pinterest, TUI used the platform during Q5 in Germany to promote early-booking offers, "pairing Christmas cues with sunny travel imagery to connect the festive moment with planning for what comes next." The post does not say which year the campaign ran.

Two results are reported. First, "TUI reached 41% more people with Premiere Spotlight placements than its annual average" (footnote 6). Second, "video completion rate was 29% higher for Premiere Spotlight takeover placements than the annual average for individual placements" (footnote 7).

Both figures need careful reading. The 41% reach figure compares Premiere Spotlight, a premium placement, with TUI's annual average, but the post does not say whether that average covers all of TUI's Pinterest campaigns, a specific format or a specific budget level. Since Premiere Spotlight is a reservation product sold for broad visibility, a higher reach figure than an always-on average is the expected result rather than a surprise. The post also does not disclose spend, so it is not possible to tell whether the extra reach came at a higher or lower cost per person reached, the comparison that would matter most in any reach and frequency assessment.

The second figure compares two different things. It sets the video completion rate on Premiere Spotlight takeover placements against "the annual average for individual placements." A takeover placement and an individual placement are different products with different positions on screen, so the 29% gap describes the difference between formats as much as anything about the Q5 creative. Pinterest presents both numbers under the line "The approach paid off," but neither isolates the effect of the festive-to-travel creative from the effect of buying a premium placement.

The creative cue attached to this section is "Think evolution, not reinvention." Pinterest lists a new headline, overlay, image, product selection or framing as ways to "reposition an existing asset for the moment."

From urgency to utility

The third shift is "Seasonal moment → next-step utility." Festive advertising, the post notes, "comes with a clock attached: order now, get it before Christmas, find the perfect last-minute gift." After 25 December, those deadlines lose their force.

This is where Pinterest places its broadest audience claim. "But the shopping doesn't stop," the post states, "1 in 2 monthly Pinterest users in Europe continue shopping in the weeks after the festive season" (footnote 8).

How big is that group? Pinterest reported 157 million monthly active users in Europe for the second quarter of 2026, according to PPC Land's coverage of those results. Half of that would be roughly 78 million people, a PPC Land calculation rather than a Pinterest figure. The post does not say whether the 1 in 2 figure comes from a survey or from on-platform behaviour, which markets it covers, or what "continue shopping" means: a purchase anywhere, a purchase influenced by Pinterest, or simply shopping-related activity on the platform.

Pinterest frames the change as a shift in the questions shoppers ask. "Why does this matter now? How does it fit into my plans? What can it help me do next?" The creative cue reads: "Lead with the outcome or practical value your product offers - and why it belongs in someone's next step."

The product layer

The final section of the post moves from creative strategy to Pinterest's own ad tools. It first maps creative to campaign objective, a simplified version of the conversion funnel. For awareness, "inspiration and fresh-start possibility may be most relevant." For consideration, the post points to showing "how your product fits the routines, choices or plans people are shaping next." For sales, "product-led creative can help people act on those plans simply and quickly."

Three tools follow.

Media library is described as a place to "organise and reuse assets in one place, making it easier to refresh creative without rebuilding from zero." According to Pinterest, teams can use it to "launch more ads, test variations and reuse top-performing media across campaigns."

Smart assembly is described as a way to "grow creative volume quickly and turn existing assets into ads, which can make a Q5 refresh more manageable for lean teams." This is the only tool paired with a statistic: "Pinterest internal data suggests creative variety is associated with stronger outcomes: ad groups with 5-10 ads are correlated with a 2.7% increase in ROAS compared to the global average" (footnote 9).

Campaign optimisation score is mentioned as a means to "identify opportunities to improve performance" before spend is increased.

What the 2.7% figure says

Pinterest's wording on the ROAS figure is notably cautious. The company uses "suggests", "associated with" and "correlated with" in a single sentence, and none of those phrases claims that adding ads causes higher returns. Advertisers who run 5 to 10 ads per ad group may simply be larger, better resourced or more experienced, and those factors could account for the difference on their own.

The baseline is also unusual. The 2.7% uplift is measured against "the global average", not against ad groups with fewer than five ads or more than ten. A 2.7% increase in ROAS is modest. On a campaign returning four times its spend, it would lift that return to about 4.1 times, again a PPC Land illustration rather than a Pinterest figure.

The same theme has surfaced in independent research. An April 2026 EMARKETER survey sponsored by Perion found that 89.2% of marketers called creative important to performance, but only 3.6% said it was well understood and actively optimised, while 72.1% waited for performance to decline before changing creative. Pinterest's Q5 guide is pitched at exactly that gap: the advertiser who leaves December creative running because nobody has time to brief a replacement.

The commercial backdrop

The guide's European focus is worth noting. It is published on the UK edition of Pinterest Business, uses British spelling throughout, names a German campaign and quotes a European audience figure. Pinterest's European business has been under pressure this year.

Europe revenue grew 27% to $186 million in the first quarter of 2026, according to PPC Land's analysis of those results. By the second quarter, growth had slowed to 12% reported and 7% in constant currency, reaching $212.7 million. Chief financial officer Julia Donnelly attributed part of the slowdown to "incremental pressure mid-quarter from Asia-based cross-border retailers impacted by regulatory actions" and said "that pressure is continuing in the third quarter." European average revenue per user stood at $1.35 in the second quarter, against $8.30 in the United States and Canada.

For comparison, Europe revenue had grown 41% reported in the third quarter of 2025, when Pinterest reached 600 million monthly active users. That same quarter, Donnelly said larger US retailers had moderated spending under tariff-related margin pressure. The company later cut about 780 jobs, under 15% of staff, in January 2026, and executives now face a securities class action filed on March 30, 2026 that alleges they misled investors about the resilience of retail ad spending. Those are allegations, not findings.

Against that background, a guide arguing that the last week of December is still worth buying, particularly in Europe, has an obvious commercial logic for Pinterest. Every advertiser that switches off campaigns on 26 December is revenue the company does not collect in the final days of its fourth quarter. Pinterest guided the third quarter of 2026 to revenue of $1,190 million to $1,210 million, growth of 13% to 15%, and will report that quarter before the 2026 festive season begins.

How it compares to Pinterest's earlier seasonal guidance

The Q5 post sits alongside the 2026 Marketing Moments Guide released in January 2026, which described a two-month lead time between early research and event dates on Pinterest, with Christmas searches building from October. That guide focused on planning ahead of a moment. The Q5 post is about what happens after it, and treats the week after Christmas as a moment of its own rather than a tail.

The product emphasis has also shifted. Pinterest's autumn 2024 ad tools announcement centred on Performance+, including generative AI that replaces white product backgrounds with lifestyle scenes. Performance+ is not mentioned anywhere in the Q5 guide, even though, by May 2026, about 30% of Pinterest's lower-funnel revenue ran through it. The guide instead points to tools that work on assets an advertiser already holds.

What the guide leaves out

Several things a buyer would need to evaluate the argument are absent from the post itself.

There are no cost figures. The post makes no claim about CPMs, cost per click or cost per acquisition during Q5, unlike Meta's 2025 guidance, which at least asserted that prices fell. It is therefore not possible to tell from the guide whether Pinterest inventory is cheaper, more expensive or unchanged in the last week of December.

There is no year attached to the TUI campaign, no spend and no conversion data. The two TUI metrics measure exposure and attention, not bookings.

There is no breakdown of the 1 in 2 European figure by country, and no indication of whether UK users, who are typically counted within Pinterest's Europe segment, behave differently from those in Germany or France.

And the nine footnotes, which the page lists under a "Footnotes" heading, are collapsed in the published version reviewed. Every number in the guide depends on one of them. Is the post's "high-engagement period" measured in searches, saves, clicks or sessions? Without the footnotes, the guide does not say.

Why this matters for marketers

The practical question the post raises is not whether creative matters, which few dispute, but whether the last week of December deserves a separate brief. Pinterest's answer rests on platform-reported behaviour that cannot be independently checked from the post, and on a single case study that compares premium placements with averages.

What the guide does establish is how Pinterest wants Q5 to be bought on its platform: with existing assets reworked through its own media library and smart assembly tools, around self-purchase, planning and practical use rather than gifting and deadlines. For European advertisers in particular, where Pinterest's revenue growth has slowed sharply in 2026, the company is making a direct pitch for budget that would otherwise go dark after Christmas. Whether the post-festive audience it describes converts at a rate that justifies the extra creative work is a question the published guide leaves open.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Pinterest, through its Pinterest Business blog (English UK edition), addressing advertisers who run festive-season campaigns. TUI is the only named advertiser, cited for a Q5 campaign in Germany.

What: A best-practice guide arguing that creative, not only budget, needs to change for Q5. It sets out three shifts (gifting to self-purchase, celebration to planning, urgency to utility), claims 1 in 2 monthly Pinterest users in Europe keep shopping after the festive season, reports TUI reaching 41% more people with Premiere Spotlight than its annual average, and links ad groups with 5 to 10 ads to a 2.7% higher ROAS than the global average. It points to media library, smart assembly and campaign optimisation score. The nine supporting footnotes are not visible in the published page.

When: Published on September 29, 2026, one week after a related festive-campaign post on September 22, 2026. The guide addresses the week between Christmas and New Year's.

Where: Pinterest Business UK edition, with a European focus: the audience figure covers Europe and the TUI case study ran in Germany.

Why: According to Pinterest, advertisers tend to either leave festive creative running or switch campaigns off after Christmas, while users shift toward buying for themselves and planning for the new year. The guide comes as Pinterest's European revenue growth slowed from 27% in the first quarter of 2026 to 12% in the second.