Online Systems Principal Engineer

Pinterest names Jason Fairchild GM of programmatic and affiliate. Thursday, August 13th, 2026 - 5:30 am Pinterest is adding more programmatic CTV inventory to its board. The social image-sharing platform expanded tvScientific CEO and Co-Founder Jason Fairchild's title to general manager of programmatic and affiliate. The title upgrade comes less than a year after Pinterest acquired the performance-focused CTV ad startup. Fairchild also remains CEO of tvScientific, which still operates as an independent business. One of Pinterest's most lucrative assets is its high-intent audience, Fairchild told AdExchanger. Pinners, as Pinterest fans are called, use the platform to compile or "pin" ideas, interests and items, and those data points serve as behavioral and interest-based signals for targeting ads. Fairchild's new title at Pinterest also indicates the parent company's increased focus on performance. When the company reported quarterly earnings earlier this month, it shared plans to fully fold tvScientific's capabilities into Performance+, its AI-driven ad platform that launched in 2024. Put a pin in that. For Pinterest, connecting latent consumer intent to clear purchase behavior is not a straightforward task. The vast majority of product searches on the platform aren't associated with specific brands. For brands and retailers, the opportunity lies in reaching Pinners with relevant items, including off platform. To capitalize on that opportunity, Pinterest wants to make its audiences more readily available through programmatic and affiliate buying channels, too, Fairchild said, not just through tvScientific's platform. And, naturally, streaming TV is an enticing target for Pinterest due to the high value of that inventory. Recent tests of Pinterest's targeting performance beyond its site and app indicated that "scaling the availability of those audiences off-platform would be a big business," Fairchild said. Ultimately, Fairchild said, Pinterest wants to help brands deliver and prove outcomes on cross-channel campaigns that target Pinterest users. Especially when it comes to streaming TV, where it's harder to attribute commercials to real-world actions. People just don't click around on smart TVs looking for things to buy the way they do on other devices (and on Pinterest, of course). Pining for performance. Advertisers are clamoring for demonstrable campaign performance at reasonable rates, and Pinterest says it's listening to those demands. Ecommerce-native brands that are adept at search and social marketing are "very performance-oriented" and "flock to CTV" when they see the proof of its efficacy, Fairchild said. Generally speaking, these performance-focused brands may make fewer upper-funnel bets on connected TV, which is still largely considered a reach vehicle. But they are open to investing more in streaming if the channel can prove that it drives online traffic and conversions like other digital marketing channels. The pool of CTV advertisers "is going to increase dramatically," Fairchild said, as these marketers with a data-driven performance mindset navigate the channel and better understand how those ads generate results - and, most importantly, how to prove those results. "There's a massive opportunity there," Fairchild said of the burgeoning streaming TV media category. But for digital-native and performance-focused marketers, the shift to CTV is "still in the early innings." Tagged in:

A 'made with AI' label on Karoline Leavitt's departure message on X intensifies the AI watermark debate. Aug 12, 2026, 7:01 PM PT Karoline Leavitt's goodbye to the White House came with an unexpected disclosure. The outgoing White House press secretary announced Wednesday that she would leave her role at the end of August after struggling to balance the job's demands with raising two young children. "The truth is since returning to the White House after the birth of my daughter, I have felt in my heart that I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary," Leavitt wrote in a lengthy post on X. At the bottom of the post, however, X displayed a "Made with AI" label, a detail that users across social media platforms quickly spotted and called out. As of around 8 p.m. Eastern, the AI label on Leavitt's post had disappeared. X and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. Below is a screenshot of how the bottom of Leavitt's post looked with the AI label before it vanished. It was not immediately clear what triggered the addition of the label to Leavitt's post, which also included two photographs. The label does not necessarily mean AI wrote Leavitt's statement. According to X's official guidelines, the platform uses the "Made with AI" label on any media it determines to be AI-generated or manipulated. Trump said in a post on X that Leavitt was departing "so she can spend more time with her beautiful young children and family," adding that she would become one of his top outside advisors. Leavitt, 28, became the youngest White House press secretary when Trump returned to office in 2025. Trump has yet to announce her replacement. Companies are making it increasingly difficult to pass off AI-generated content as entirely human-made. In July, YouTube said it would be demonetizing mass-produced generic content and AI personas designed to game the platform. Substack and Pinterest have also launched tools intended to help readers identify AI-generated content. Anthropic said this week that new Claude models will weave an "imperceptible watermark" into generated text. The signal can survive copying, pasting, and some editing, though extensive rewriting, translation, or combining the output with other text could remove it, the company said. Anthropic cautioned that its watermark would not prove Claude wrote an entire document, and that using the chatbot to proofread or translate human writing could also leave a detectable mark. Business Insider's Katie Notopoulos wrote on Tuesday that the watermark could complicate life for people reluctant to acknowledge that they're using AI, from students submitting assignments to authors and professionals publishing polished posts under their own names. "Once AI detectors or watermarks are more ingrained in popular products, does it become more or less embarrassing to be caught using AI to write?" Notopoulos wrote. "I'm not really sure where the evolving norms around AI writing will land." Katherine Li is a reporter on Business Insider's West Coast business news team. She covers career, the AI startup culture, and how AI is affecting economic sentiments. Previously, she was a newsroom fellow who wrote international breaking news and produced newsletters for Semafor. Before that, she wrote about climate policies for The Lever, covered the AAPI community for the SF Chronicle as a freelancer, and wrote about the 2019 Hong Kong protests as an intern for The New York Times. She is an alumna of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and a graduate of the international journalism program at Hong Kong Baptist University with minors in French and English literature. Email Katherine at [email protected] and follow her on Bluesky @katherineli.bsky.social. Expertise * Careers and hiring trends * AI startups * Trade policies & tariffs