Pinterest pilots clean room with Albertsons' retail media arm

Pinterest is piloting a new advertising feature that is geared toward helping marketers in a post-cookie world.

The news: Pinterest is partnering with LiveRamp to give select customers access to clean rooms. The grocer Albertsons is the first customer, and will initially use the tools available for closed-loop measurement of ads placed on Pinterest.

What’s a clean room? Clean rooms offer a third-party space for retailers to join their first-party data collected from customer purchases and loyalty programs with Pinterest user data. User data is kept private. The clean room will provide aggregated insights into ad performance.

What will Albertsons offer? Pinterest is partnering with retail media networks through this initiative. Albertsons operates such a network to provide brands with advertising opportunities through the Albertsons website that leverage its first-party data. These networks can be used to serve ads on outside platforms like Pinterest, as well, but they often do so for multiple brands. So they often need custom options in order to report results for individual brands, Pinterest said. Through this partnership, brands on the Albertsons Media Network will be able to access closed-loop reporting. The initial focus will be a winter healthy eating campaign that measures metrics such as return on ad spend (ROAS).

What are they doing about privacy? Within the clean room, personally identifiable info and proprietary sales and campaign data is not disclosed. LiveRamp also said it is offering controls, such as aggregation thresholds, that limit how data can be accessed, joined, queried or shared.

Key quote from Kristi Argyilan, SVP Retail Media, Albertsons Media Collective: “We believe using clean rooms can provide our clients with the data they expect to make informed decisions about their advertising in a privacy-preserving manner. While our initial test pilot focuses on enabling closed-loop measurement, this partnership will ultimately provide our team a more holistic view of our customers’ digital footprint to unlock more advanced measurement capabilities, like incrementality and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), down the road."

Trends to watch:

Privacy imperative: The partnership underscores how the digital ad environment is evolving: Apple’s Ad Tracking Transparency and the demise of cookies mean third-party data and powerful attribution tools that drove the last decade of advertising will have less power for marketers. Therefore, they are seeking to use first-party data that is collected directly from customers. While this data can have specifics that create barriers to sharing it freely to other platforms, clean rooms offer a space where they can do so and privacy is maintained.

Retail media: National grocers like Albertsons are well-positioned in this next wave, since they have marketplaces that attract traffic and large amounts of first-party data to target customers. So they are standing up retail media networks, such as the Albertsons Media Collective. Amazon, Walmart, Kroger and a host of other retailers now run robust retail media networks. For more on the growth of this advertising segment, check out our primer on retail media.

Bringing the data together: When it comes to running effective campaigns, data can be a multiplier of success. So there’s an advantage to be had in joining together data from a retailer like Albertsons where people buy products, and a social platform like Pinterest, where people often discover products. Retail media and clean rooms show that there is promise for that sharing to take place across walled gardens, and do so in a way that adheres with the privacy norms that the internet is quickly adopting. Beyond measurement, such a collaboration could also help brands understand the impact of advertising on sales across these different channels.