Submitted photo via Tribune News ServiceBob Gilbreath and Michael Wohlschlaeger are the co-founders of Ahalogy, which helps brands such as Kraft and Toms shoes get their products in front of Pinterest users.

Search for oat-based recipes on visual bookmarking site Pinterest, and it will bring up a screen of oatmeal porn.

Images of gooey oats covered in strawberries, chocolate chips, drizzled with glistening honey take over the screen.

Click on the top results and the majority probably will have something to do with Quaker.

The images, or “Pins,” as they’re referred to on Pinterest, might redirect to a recipe on Quaker’s site. They might go to a food blog post sponsored by Quaker. Or, subtly, in the background of an image, there might be a big tub of Quaker oats, hovering behind an enticing bowl of oatmeal.

Coincidence? Not exactly.

Quaker’s ubiquity in those oat-based search results is largely the effort of Ahalogy, a marketing startup that specializes in Pinterest. The company exists to help brands such as Quaker, Kraft and Toms shoes get their products in front of Pinterest users, while also not annoying anyone.

Unobtrusive advertising? It’s a tough one. That’s why Ahalogy co-founder Bob Gilbreath has created a company of nearly 50 people working exclusively on Pinterest. Nothing else.

Some marketers might call Gilbreath and Ahalogy crazy. He would say his company is ahead of the curve.

And some might ask: What on Earth is Pinterest, let alone a Pinterest-focused marketing firm? Gilbreath would laugh, sigh a little, then laugh again.

Pinterest is an image-based search engine. Type in anything you want — 2007 Ferraris, knee-high boots, Thanksgiving ideas and, yes, oatmeal recipes — and it will pull up hundreds of pins that people have uploaded. Some might lead to other websites. Some might just be images. If you want to save a pin for later, you can click the “Pin it” button, which saves it to a board. It’s like Google and scrapbooking rolled into one.

And Ahalogy believes that there’s big money to be made from it. The Cincinnati company has raised $7 million in funding from investors such as Hyde Park Ventures and CincyTech.

It doesn’t do other forms of marketing. There’s no Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat team. There’s no backup plan. If Pinterest ceased to exist, Ahalogy wouldn’t exist. At the same time, it does not belong to, nor is it part of Pinterest.

How’s that for an existential threat?

Gilbreath laughs. Maybe he is crazy. He’s pretty sure he’s not.

“I can see this movie playing,” he said, spinning his index finger in the air like film going through a projector; someone peering into Ahalogy’s office could have easily mistaken his gesture for “crazy,” though. “I’ve seen the same model repeat again and again.”

A marketing veteran who got his start at Procter & Gamble, platform skepticism isn’t new to Gilbreath. He saw it with the Web in the 1990s, when television advertising was king and “Internet” marketing was thought to be a joke.

He saw it with the rise of Facebook, when marketers were hesitant to figure out social media because they thought it was a fad.

And now he’s seeing it with Pinterest, which recently cracked 100 million users.

But Gilbreath knows there is more to it than being first.

Early players in the Facebook game, like marketing firms Buddy Media and Wildfire, were successful (and later acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars by Salesforce and Google respectively) because they bet on the right horse. Being first to, say, Bebo or the now-defunct Piczo wouldn’t have helped them much.

A large part of Ahalogy’s confidence comes from the belief that, in addition to being first, the firm is betting on the right platform. And, judging by San Francisco-based Pinterest’s $11 billion valuation, they’re not alone in thinking that.

Ahalogy has 40 clients, including Kraft, Kellogg’s Town House crackers, Toms and Quaker. For each brand, it will create as many as five to 10 pins per day. Its designers will try them in every variation: a pin with text, a pin without text, swapping out images, tagging them differently, adding a logo, removing a logo.

The company’s early results have been promising, driving product sales and raising brand awareness unseen on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. More telling is the fact that many of the big brands that signed up with Ahalogy when it launched in 2012 have stuck with it.

“They’ve been an extremely valuable strategic partner,” said Zachary Wyer, Kellogg’s brand manager on Town House Crackers, which has worked with Ahalogy for more than two years and has seen most of its user growth and engagement happen on Pinterest.

“The cracker business is more than 85 years old, and even recently consumers still think of us as a formal, oval cracker,” he said. “We’re hoping to change that perception of the business, and we think Ahalogy is the perfect partner for it. They have the savvy on the platform few agencies do. That’s part of the reason we chose them.”