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Pinterest Looks To Reinvent Itself With New Advertising Campaign

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- While social networks like Facebook want you to live in augmented or virtual realities, Pinterest hopes to inspire your real life. The virtual pinboard is making a push to prove its not a social network.

"You don't come to Pinterest to share," said co-founder Evan Sharp. Pinterest is not about expressing yourself to others, its not about sharing with friends"

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Instead, Pinterest is a site for coming up with ideas, according to CEO Ben Selbermann.

"If we are the place that you go on your phone to figure out what you're going to do with your life, we become this planning capability that is almost essential to people in the same way that Google becomes essential to people when they knew what they were looking for," said Selbermann.

Hoping to reinvent itself as a visual search engine and not a social network, Pinterest is set to launch its first major ad campaign this summer.

"I really love the idea that there is a place you can go that is constantly inspiring you to try new things and is giving you all the knowledge and information to actually make those real," said CEO Ben Silbermann. "I hope that Pinterest would someday be so useful to people they could so reliably get inspiring ideas that they wouldn't be able to imagine how they used to just go through life and find inspiration for things."

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The advertising push comes as other social networks mimic parts of its product. Google recently added shoppable photos in image searches and Facebook-owned Instagram now allows you to save collections of photos.

To further separate itself from other photo and video heavy apps, Pinterest has removed the "like" button on its site.

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