The media company Hearst Magazines, home to titles including Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and Good Housekeeping, unveiled a new platform on Tuesday, called Aura IQ, that combines artificial intelligence with its first-party data to automate audience-building and campaign planning.
The platform is built on top of a preexisting product, an audience-targeting solution called Aura, which Hearst Magazines launched in June 2024. That offering used contextual signals to build 30 distinct personas, called Auras, which the company would use as the basis for brand campaigns. Today, Hearst Magazines uses Aura in one in every three of its campaigns.
With Aura IQ, which has launched internally but will debut to the public during Cannes Lions, the company has taken the technology a step further.
The new platform introduces AI agents to automate several core advertising functions. In doing so, the company has been able to accomplish tasks that previously took hours, such as building custom audiences, analyzing campaign performance, and responding to RFPs, in just minutes, according to Mike Nuzzo, the senior vice president and head of data solutions and insights at Hearst Magazines.
“We’ve been thinking about agentic for the better part of a year, and in the past eight months, we’ve put pen to paper,” Nuzzo said. “We’ve built an agentic platform, in that we have a [model context protocol] and agents underneath it that help us do task-based work that used to take a long time.”
Aura IQ operates across three main workflows. The first is content trend analysis, where an agent monitors what is performing editorially and automatically builds audiences from those signals.
The second is campaign analysis, moving beyond basic click and impression metrics toward click-cluster analysis that can optimize delivery around specific content types.
The third, and the most significant for advertisers, is bespoke audience generation. Now, rather than fitting an RFP into one of the pre-built Aura audience segments, Aura IQ ingests the exact language of an RFP and constructs a custom audience from scratch.
