Pinterest video titles show 40 characters: burn the hook in

Pinterest's ad specs say a video ad title can be up to 100 characters but only the first 40 show in the feed, or 30 for CJK text. The description can run to 800 characters and is not shown in the feed. So the part of your message that every viewer sees is the first 40 characters of the title plus whatever is in the video. Sume video captions can burn the rest into the first seconds for $0.20.

The text limits

Values from Pinterest's page, read on 2026-10-08.

Check the title first

Count the characters before you write the video. The script below prints how much of a title shows and what is cut. It counts Python characters, which is a close guide for plain Latin text; for CJK text use the 30 character limit instead.

title = "Spring sale: 30 percent off every plan until Friday"
shown = title[:40]
print(len(title), "characters")
print("shows:", shown)
print("hidden:", title[40:])
assert len(title) <= 100

Burn the hook into the first frames

Video captions takes cues with text, start and end, and draws them without speech-to-text. A cue from 0 to 3 seconds that carries the offer means the message is in the video before the title matters. A 6 to 15 second video, which is what Pinterest recommends, is within the 60 second ceiling for the $0.20 price. Use design.placement.anchor_ratio to keep the line away from the lower part of the frame where the title and button sit in the feed.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: pin-hook-001" \
  -d '{"video_url":"https://example-cdn.test/pin-12s.mp4","style":"punch","cues":[{"text":"30 percent off until Friday","start":0,"end":3}]}'

If the cut is too long

Pinterest takes video from 4 seconds, so a clip cut to 6 to 15 seconds is the recommended range. If your ad is longer, trim it first: video trim is $0.02 and takes a duration from 0.2 to 900 seconds. The full path for a 25 second source is one trim ($0.02) and one caption job ($0.20), $0.22 in total. Do the trim first, then caption the trimmed file, so the cue times refer to the final cut and not to the longer source. Write a title that works alone: the first 40 characters should name the offer, and the video should show it. Keep the two from repeating each other word for word, because the viewer sees both together.