• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, June 23, 2016

Hearst is helping advertisers align themselves with the most popular content trending across its properties through a new service, Buzzing@Hearst, offering marketers real-time insights into what people are reading, watching and sharing on social media.

Clients can then use Hearst’s programmatic ad sales platform to target audiences gravitating to these pieces of content.

Buzzing@Hearst builds on Hearst’s content distribution platform, MediaOS, to track engagement across all the publisher’s digital media properties, including the Web sites for its newspapers, magazines and TV channels.

Hearst properties tracked by Buzzing@Hearst include Elle, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, the Houston Chronicle, and local TV stations across the country.

Buzzing measures engagement for every article currently published on a Hearst site using hundreds of signals, updated every 90 seconds, and then assigns a “Buzzing Score” (from 1-20) to each piece of content.

The service is also linked to DoubleClick for Publishers, allowing advertisers to bid for inventory alongside currently trending content in real time, employing a variety of other targeting criteria allowed by the programmatic sales platform.

On the editorial side, Hearst editors can use information from Buzzing to identify the most engaging content on their own and other Hearst sites, in order to curate and develop content that’s both popular and relevant to their own publication.

Hearst cited one recent example, in which a piece from Elle’s UK edition about Kate Middleton deviating from the royal dress code attracted a large audience in Britain, and was subsequently picked up by Hearst’s U.S. editors as well.

Of course, Hearst isn’t the only big publisher focusing on big data and programmatic sales.

Earlier this year, Conde Nast unveiled new programmatic options centering on its “Premium at Scale” service, which allows marketers to target CN’s online audiences using demographic and contextual data through an automated interface. The publisher is also offering programmatic executions linked to specific events for increased contextual relevance.