Pinterest has announced a new partnership with LiveRamp to implement data ‘clean rooms’ for selected Pinterest ad partners, which will enable brands to utilize their first-party data for ad targeting, without having to re-share that info with Pinterest.

Clean Rooms help to manage the data upload and encryption process, by ensuring that user-level data is never directly shared between parties. Essentially, the process enables businesses to show their ads to people who’ve got an existing relationship with both the business and the ad hosting site, while also keeping that data wholly separate.

As explained by Pinterest:

“Pinterest’s integration with LiveRamp provides a protected, third-party space where brands like Albertsons can join their first-party data and Pinterest platform data in a secure environment. The clean room keeps data private, and provides aggregated insight into ad performance. Because the neutral clean room environment offers advanced privacy controls, neither party’s personally identifiable sales and campaign data is visible to the other party.” 

Amid ongoing changes to data collection processes, from Apple’s iOS tracking updates, to Google’s planned changes to cookie tracking, every platform is now working to develop new processes to facilitate personalized ad targeting, without the need for data sharing across different apps.

Clean rooms have emerged as a possible solution, helping ad partners merge their own data with platforms to facilitate more direct targeting and tracking, with Meta and LinkedIn also implementing clean rooms, in different ways, to facilitate the same.

Pinterest is keen to ramp up its ad business, in order to capitalize on its business opportunities. While the app has gotten itself back on track, in terms of user growth, over the past year, Pinterest ads are still not available in all regions, and it’s still working to provide optimal targeting and performance elements to encourage more ad spend.

The new restrictions on data collection make this more challenging, and as such, it’s good to see Pinterest looking to implement new solutions to address this element, and facilitate new ways for brands to reach its 445 million users.

Pinterest says that grocery retailer Albertsons will be the first advertiser to utilize this new solution, with more ad partners to follow.