Two years ago, publishing group Hearst Magazines announced the launch of AURA, an in-house tool which ingests a range of contextual, behavioural, and commerce signals to help advertisers find audiences and target ads. First-party data tools have been a major focus in the publishing world over the past six years, helping media companies leverage the range of user data they have access to in order to meet buyer demand for data-powered targeting. According to Hearst, AURA currently powers one in three campaigns bought across Hearst Magazines’ portfolio, which includes Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Esquire.
This week, the company has announced an evolved version of this product, AURA IQ, which it describes as an “agentic intelligence layer that transforms Hearst’s first-party data, editorial authority, and audience insights into dynamic, scalable media strategy”. The agentic layer takes AURA beyond audience targeting, enabling brands to build custom audiences based on their own unique needs. Hearst Magazines says AURA IQ can take an RFP and build out media strategies and relevant audiences.
“AURA IQ represents the evolution of AURA from a powerful targeting capability into an intelligent media engine,” said Hearst Magazines global chief revenue officer Lisa Ryan Howard. “This agentic platform allows us to build recommendations in a faster, smarter, more automated fashion and allows us to uncover real time trends, anticipate market shifts and work more strategically with marketers and advertisers.”
Speeding up bespoke
We’ve seen lots of movement on the buy-side of the industry when it comes to building out agentic workflows. But for publishers themselves, a lot of the focus when it comes to AI has been fairly defensive: ensuring that their inventory is fairly valued by AI agents, fighting to protect their IP from AI scraping, and building monetisation models which are less impacted by traffic declines.
But there are certainly plenty of opportunities for the sell-side. While many publishers have spent a lot of time and money building out their first-party data capabilities and have a wealth of data which can be valuable to advertisers, it’s commonly used to build standardised audiences which can then be pitched to brands. Building custom audiences for a specific brief requires a lot more manual work, diving into datasets to find groups of visitors which uniquely fit the advertiser’s objectives.
The idea with AURA IQ is to massively speed up and simplify this process. That in turn makes it simpler for Hearst to create bespoke strategies and audiences for a wider range of potential clients, ultimately helping it create a more compelling pitch. This AI-powered tool may also pick up on opportunities which might be missed otherwise.
“AURA IQ is designed to turn data-informed insights into strategy,” said Mike Nuzzo, SVP and head of data solutions and insights at Hearst Magazines. “We’re moving beyond organising data to rapidly interpreting signals, identifying opportunities and building bespoke audiences and scalable campaign strategies that drive real business outcomes.”
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