CVS Media Exchange (CMX), the retail media network of CVS, is the latest retailer to join Pinterest’s data clean room initiative.

• The data clean room, developed with LiveRamp, launched early last year with Albertsons as its first retailer partner.
• Wayfair also announced it would trial Pinterest’s clean room solution.

“The beauty of a clean room is that it's a privacy-centric way for CVS to share data from its 74 million Extra Care members and for us to share the data from our 498 million users, and end up with a repository of powerful, completely anonymized first-party data,” said Carrie Sweeney, VP of retail at Pinterest. “Then we can connect our users with targeted ads without sharing any of their personal data, just as CVS can on its website.”

Data clean rooms enable retail media networks and partners to more accurately measure campaign performance.

• Following performance measurement was the most important factor in allocating retail media spend, according to US consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers, per December 2023 data from Skai and Path to Purchase Institute.
• “With this technology CMX can measure attributed sales that are related to the campaigns that run on Pinterest more accurately, and then share that back with the CPG supplier, which empowers them to make more data-driven decisions,” said Sweeney.

As third-party cookie deprecation approaches, advertisers will increasingly look to retail media networks for access to first-party data.

• 86.0% of ad buyers in the Americas believe that first-party data is extremely or very important when deciding which retail media networks to partner with, per our November 2023 survey.
• “While the industry is moving away from traditional audience identifiers, our deep first-party data gives us a strong foundation in the face of cookie deprecation,” said Parbinder Dhariwal, vice president and general manager at CMX. “This is a fantastic example of why we need to always be innovating and embracing new methods for data collaboration and analysis across the industry.

Sweeney sees advertiser adoption of data clean rooms growing, with a bit of a learning curve.

• 39% of US brands and agencies will be significantly or somewhat more focused on data clean rooms in 2024, per November 2023 data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
• “Advertisers are curious about clean rooms but they want to learn more,” she said. “But it’s not a decision they’re making lightly. You have to figure out which partners to work with, how to operationalize it, consider the costs. But I think there’s a groundswell of recognition that this is a powerful option in the suite of privacy-centric tools and we’ll see more experimentation this year.”

This was originally featured in the Retail Media Weekly newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.