Scaling social publishing workflows through integrated collaboration
Instagram Collab Publishing
Date
I really dont remember
Company
BuzzFeed
Scenario
BuzzFeed’s social teams rely heavily on Instagram Collabs to expand reach, but PubHub (internal publishing tool) didn’t support this workflow. Teams had to manually add collabs, loosing track of social data.
Roles
Workflow mapping
UX/UI design
Interaction design
System design
Product thinking
Handoff
Challenge
How might we integrate Collab publishing into PubHub to reduce manual coordination, improve visibility, and scale content output?
Results
~5 minutes
time saved / post
2.5X CTR
on Ad increase
Revenue increase
at Ad campaigns
Before (And why it wasn’t working)
Permutive
Before Reverb, Ad Ops teams had to:
manually define user's demographic attributes.
tag or categorize content to proper atribute them with themes.
create multi-condition logic queries.
iterate multiple times to double-check and produce a usable segment.
constantly update campaigns as new articles were published.
relies on an expensive third-party tool.
In practice, creating a segment required navigating complex data models, taxonomies, and event configurations before even defining the audience.
The result was a workflow that was slow, highly technical, difficult to scale, and expensive to maintain.
Project Goals
Generate contextual audiences quickly
Remove complexity from the process
Scale targeting across all BuzzFeed’s brands
Support privacy-safe advertising.
Reduce reliance on third-party tools
Maintain legacy segments available
The Solution: Reverb
Main table
Creation method 1 - AI Assistance
Give a prompt, AI will analyse and select matching articles to be your seed articles.
Users can simply describe the audience they want to reach in natural language.
Example: “People interested in home organization and interior design.”The AI analyzes the prompt and correlates it with existing content themes, article embeddings, and audience signals across BuzzFeed’s content ecosystem.
The system then generates a contextual cluster of relevant articles and audiences.
After selecting Seed articles, pick a relevancy score. This will filter how similar the segment must be. Also, this will affect its size; the stricter you are, the smaller the segment pool will be.
Creation method 2 - Manually input seed articles
For cases when the Ad ops team wants to be specific or already has an idea of which articles are performing well in campaigns.
View mode
UX Key Decisions
Start from intent, not data
Data setting an audience you don't know is hard. It's easyer to describe how you imagine its behaviour is, and identify your audience from that.
Support multiple mental models
Some users think in concepts, others in previous examples and experiences. We support both.
Balance simplicity with control
Works with minimal input, but allows refinement.
Enable discovery
Previous tools required knowing what to target. Now you can find out from user behavior.
Make the system understandable without exposing the model
Trust came from seeing results, not understanding math.
Results achieved
Cost reduction of
+500k/year
in third party segment tool cost
Increase on
2.5X CTR
cause smarter targeting means better content relevancy
Revenue increase
better results make for more valuable Ad slots
Platform unification
create segment and manage campaigns at the same tool
Time saving
to go from ad concept to live audience
Simple flow
Making work easier is always a win
How the numbers are calculated:
The $500K/year cost reduction comes directly from the Permutive contract — a third-party cost eliminated when the in-house tool matched its capabilities.
The 2.5X CTR lift was tracked across campaigns over several months of live usage, comparing Reverb-generated segments against the previous targeting approach.
