We needed to create a rich selection of content for viewers, while minimizing the effort required by Hearst’s internal team. HearstLive relies on a mix of timely content curated and designed by a dedicated in-house Hearst team, procedurally generated content drawn from Hearst brand social feeds, and pre-programmed evergreen content drawn from Hearst’s internal archives.

The installation acts as a digital billboard, serving bold headlines and highlighting the best stories from Hearst. The mobile companion site, HearstLive.com, is created simultaneously in the CMS. It encourage visitors to explore the stories in more depth, and drives traffic to Hearst’s online properties and social media feeds.

Working with our engineering partner Activate the Space, we ordered 1,348 custom-made LED modules (with a total of 7 million LEDs). The LED modules are mounted on 1600 square feet of handmade millwork and powered by a unique media rack utilizing 16 MacBook Pros.

A custom-built application, utilizing WebGL and Canvas displays within the HTML5 markup language, powers the visual output to the LED displays. Additionally, the Brand Central experience at the corner of the installation uses Twitter and Instagram APIs for real-time display of Hearst-related social media content.

New content for the displays is produced multiple times a day by a team of editors and designers at Hearst. To accomplish an editorial and design workflow that facilitates programming the HearstLive experience, we leveraged and expanded upon a custom CMS created by the agency in 2014 to control Hearst.com to manage the entire experience.

HearstLive takes responsive design in publishing to a new level, allowing stories to scale from a smart phone to a city block. We leveraged our rich experience creating publishing platforms to build a one-of-a-kind canvas with a bespoke CMS for a high volume of daily content.

The companion HearstLive mobile site garnered over half a billion total impressions within the first 48 hours, with almost 19% of the total impressions generated by social media.