BuzzFeed is giving WPP's Mindshare data on some of the fast-moving stories on social media to help the media agency shape both real-time and long-term campaigns for its clients.
Mindshare plans to announce the partnership widely Wednesday morning after BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti makes a presentation to the agency's leadership team.
The partnership is the latest step in BuzzFeed's effort to deepen its ties to media agencies. Last May, BuzzFeed teamed up with Vayner Media to roll out its social storytelling program, which aims to seed the market with agencies and people that will produce BuzzFeed-style posts. It began working with indie shop Horizon Media and Interpublic Group of Cos.' UM last August as part of a similar program that gave them metrics on the effectiveness of branded content.
Mindshare is becoming the first agency with direct access to BuzzFeed Fre.sh, a proprietary app that ranks the fastest-moving stories on social media from BuzzFeed and its 200 partner sites at any given moment. Anyone can see a version of Fre.sh here, but Mindshare will get a more direct feed that will be easier to plug into the agency's own systems.
Mindshare will also get additional analysis, such as the kinds of topics that typically pop as well as the sites where they most often originate.
"What it comes down to is finding innovative ways of using the data we have about sharing and how we can drive insights for the advertisers that are using this product," said Jonathan Perelman, GM-video and VP-agency strategy at BuzzFeed.
Mindshare plans to incorporate the data into its "Loop" strategy, which is meant to use a variety of data points to shift media spend quickly and, to a smaller extent, inform clients' creative in "real time" when appropriate, according to Jordan Bitterman, Mindshare's chief strategy officer. That might mean altering a search-keyword buy, changing the targeting parameters on a paid-social-media campaign buy or swapping elements of a display campaign.
It could lead to the production of a Vine video in a matter of hours based on what's trending online, he added, or planning a "broadcast-quality" video for distribution several weeks later.
"We can utilize this data feed to learn what's trending on the web and where to spend our paid media," Mr. Bitterman said. Naturally, some of that money will be spent on BuzzFeed, which Mr. Bitterman described as a "good home for our dollars."
"The idea that we can get more intelligent on the back of their data with the agreement that we can stay closer together is a very smart play on their part," he said.
BuzzFeed does not directly charge Mindshare for the data, nor has it charged other agencies. But these agencies' overall spending with BuzzFeed typically crosses a threshold, which it doesn't disclose, the company has said.
