Taykey unveils a free online trend-watcher

A screen from Taykey’s free Trend Pulse

New York City-based Taykey makes its living by being trendy.

That is, it determines the leading trends in specific areas of interest for brand clients by crawling videos, publishers’ sites, social media and other online sources. Netflix, for instance, might be releasing a new political series that is targeted at viewers aged 18 to 35, so Taykey might find the leading political trends and then locate stories about them.

This is more useful to brands than a Google Trends, founder and CEO Amit Avner told me, because those kinds of general trackers tend to feature broad pop culture topics like Justin Bieber.

Today, Taykey is making available a free trend tracker called Trend Pulse, based on its platform. Four categories will be presented and changed daily. At launch, they are Adults 18-plus, Moms, Millennials and Tech Enthusiasts. Each category includes trending topics, sentiment, conversational patterns and related interests. Here’s a detail screen you see after clicking on one of the trending topics:

When a brand employs Taykey in a paid engagement, it chooses the categories where it wants to see trends. Taykey determines the relevant trends, and then locates several hundred URLs of articles about that topic. The URLs are exported to the brand’s demand side platform (DSP) so that ad buys can be directed at those pages. The free Trend Pulse doesn’t reveal the URLs of stories related to the trends.

Trend Pulse, Avner noted, is a kind of teaser for the custom services his company offers, as well as a window into some of the trends that might appeal to a brand. In addition to the free service, Taykey is also announcing a new Campaign Dashboard for its regular service, including the capability to determine the trends that lead to the most effective ad engagement.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.