Pinterest Demonstrates Business Value and Deepens Brand Partnerships with Data Collaboration

The Challenge

Nearly 500 million people come to Pinterest every month to look for recipe, home, and style inspiration – and to plan their next purchase. As an advertising platform, it appeals to brands with its wide reach, enviable customer demographics, and natural ad format. Pinners are on the platform looking for new ideas and brand content is designed to inspire, not interrupt.

Pinterest, like all publishers, is facing the loss of third-party signals, the primary tool the digital advertising industry has long depended on to serve relevant ads and measure effectiveness. With this seismic change, Pinterest needed to find new solutions to protect pinners’ privacy, stay ahead of evolving regulations, and deliver results for advertisers.

The Solution

In January 2023, Pinterest announced a new integration with LiveRamp, a longtime partner, to pilot LiveRamp Clean Rooms with select advertising partners. LiveRamp’s cutting-edge clean room technology would enable permissioning, measurement, and other innovative data collaboration capabilities in a secure collaboration environment with built-in proprietary privacy-enhancing technologies.

In this protected space, advertisers could use RampID, the most durable, privacy-centric identifier for connecting the digital ecosystem, to join select first-party data and Pinterest platform data without sharing customers’ personally identifiable information. This meant that Pinterest and its collaboration partners could maximize their valuable first-party data while upholding their customers’ privacy choices and maintaining full control over how their data was accessed and shared. Data could also be shared across cloud providers.

Pinterest announced its first partner in the new collaboration environment would be Albertsons, one of the largest food and drug retailers in America, with more than 30 million shoppers each week. As Pinterest CRO Bill Watkins shared in the announcement, the partnership would be an ongoing initiative to deliver closed-loop reporting (measurement allowing ad exposure data to be matched to sales data) for brands participating in Albertsons’ retail media network, Albertsons Media Collective. The teams launched a winter healthy eating campaign to start.

In summer 2023, Pinterest and Albertsons Media Collective ran a test with snacking giant Mondelēz International, home to iconic brands including Oreo, Cadbury, and Ritz. The company wanted to expand reach and drive sales for Triscuit crackers. Together, Pinterest, Albertsons, and Mondelēz deployed a targeted charcuterie campaign. The six-week campaign would prove to be a valuable test of the data collaboration capabilities Pinterest had invested in.

The Results

For the Mondelēz test, Pinterest and Albertsons Media Collective combined their first-party data sets, enabling Triscuit to reach new audiences and improve campaign measurement. On Pinterest, the team was able to target pinners actively searching for inspiration on hosting summer events and making charcuterie boards, serving Pinterest display ads in the home feed and in search inventory. Triscuit also targeted this audience on Albertsons.com and using Google demand-side platform DV360 to serve ads on offsite channels.

Triscuit experienced a 16% lift in sales and units and a 19% lift in buyers during the campaign, and the team was able to pinpoint these increases as incremental – notoriously difficult to do with precision – using closed-loop reporting to match ad exposure data with sales data. As Evan Hovorka, VP of Product & Innovation at Albertsons Media Collective put it, “This was just a win-win-win across the board. The truth was out there, but we couldn’t get to it without LiveRamp’s privacy-conscious clean room in the middle.”

The test confirmed a number of the Pinterest team’s hypotheses. First, advertisers and publishers need not fear a future of signal loss. New privacy-centric solutions like the LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform can be even more effective in driving business results than the old way of doing things, and certainly better for consumers.

Second, new measurement capabilities made it possible to measure the true incrementality of each advertising investment, reducing reliance on proxy metrics. The collaborators could see exactly how Pinterest advertising online drove offline sales. This was a huge unlock, given that in grocery, the vast majority of sales are still offline, and CPGs investing in advertising are hungry for proof of performance. As Carrie Sweeney said, “It feels funny now – with other partners who aren’t in a clean room yet, we will talk about CPC going down 4% week over week. It’s so far away from what actually matters. We used those signals valiantly when they were all we had, but it is just so much better to talk about actual matched ad exposure data.”

The collaboration has only made the Pinterest team more excited about new possibilities, such as expanding audience targeting capabilities in the collaboration platform and collaborating with additional CPG partners to solve complex advertising and measurement challenges. The LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform has helped them to deepen partnership, trust, and transparency with the CPGs and media networks they work with, prove their value, and innovate together to drive brand and business results for all parties.

For more on the Pinterest/Albertsons collaboration, listen to Carrie Sweeney and Evan Hovorka talk with LiveRamp’s Scott Baker about their partnership here.