• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, March 26, 2014

WPP’s Mindshare has formed a strategic partnership with BuzzFeed that will be part of the agency’s “Loop” operation that is designed to identify and activate real-time media and marketing opportunities for its clients.

Under the terms of the deal, Mindshare will receive detailed access to BuzzFeed Fre.sh data, which analyzes and ranks how its stories move across social media. In return, Mindshare has made a commitment to buy ads on the BuzzFeed site.

According to Mindshare managing director James Powell, who orchestrated the agreement on behalf of the agency, the BuzzFeed deal is one the first that the agency has made in connection with its Loop system that combines both insight aggregation and activation.

“Part of our commitment to clients with the Loop is to identify what’s culturally relevant in terms of content,” Powell said, which dovetails nicely with BuzzFeed’s commitment to its readers.

According to Powell, the Fre.sh interface is now connected to the Loop system, while the agency is still working on interpreting the data and sorting out the best ways to pull insights from it.

BuzzFeed is committed to helping in that regard. According to Powell, every quarter a team of BuzzFeed’s “best and brightest” will visit Mindshare offices in North America for brainstorming sessions on content creation and optimizing the use of the Fre.sh data.

Mindshare rolled out its Loop system a few months back in a bid to expand its real-time marketing efforts to include paid media along with owned and earned media. The agency has set up Loop war rooms in each of its North American offices that are equipped with banks of TV screens that track the implementation of advertising and marketing programs of clients and competitors and how consumers are responding. The agency intends to roll the system out worldwide.

The agency has signed deals with a number of third-party analytics vendors to help with the effort, including iSpot.tv, Ace Metrix, Moat and Curalate. Mindshare’s own proprietary spending and performance tracking tools also interface with the Loop system.