Long before I was a product manager, I was a stock curator. Back then, my world was a walled garden, every piece of content was cataloged and searchable. My job was simple: find what the client asked for. The why didn’t matter.
Soon content requests started to become more critical of the stock we had on the shelf. “no model-looking people” “need candid moments” “need regular people” “need more diversity” they wanted User Generated Content.
This massive interest UGC was exploding when I made the move from a stock house to Catch + Release. The shift from stock to curating user-generated content was scary! The walled garden was gone. The internet was vast, noisy, and unpredictable. Every platform Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram had its own search logic. We could no longer rely on a comfortable, well-trodden taxonomy. Finding content that fit the creative brief was suddenly very time-consuming and complex. The scenarios described in briefs were believable, but actually finding those exact moments ‘in the wild’ felt at times impossible.
The Curation Blueprint
From that chaos, we built a process.
The first step was understanding the why behind every brief. Before thinking about details, we needed clarity on the overall intention or story the brief was telling.
Once we had that clarity, we’d identify how many actual distinct content Topics were contained in the brief. Tactically, we’d assign the categories to different team members to focus on.
With a focus on our assigned Topic we’d peel back scenarios listed in the brief to identify its core action or emotion — we ask ourselves -what exactly made it the example in the brief work? How does it relate to the overall concept? This insight helped us conceive adjacent scenarios that could achieve the same purpose, even if they looked different on the surface.
Armed with clarity search ideas, we’d move to querying. Knowing what and why to search is only half the story, the other half is understanding where the ideal content might naturally live and how it’s described there. This requires what we call social platform fluency: recognizing the nuances of how creators share and label their work across platforms. For example, what would motivate a creator to post a video on YouTube versus TikTok? How might they title or describe that same moment differently on each? Understanding this enabled us to effectively search each platform for the content we needed.
Brief dissection and platform fluency became our superpower, which helped us discover great content for xXX brands, and xXXX projects. Since 20xx. This is the framework became the foundation for our new AI-powered search tool.
Scaling our Search-Superpowers
We’ve built a network of AI agents that operate on the same principles our curators use, so that we can help Agency and Brand creatives save valuable time finding authentic content.
One agent interprets the brief to detect the overarching concept, which is a through-line that other agents reference throughout the process. Another decomposes the brief into comprehensive, non-overlapping themes. Other agents identify examples in the brief, suggest adjacent examples, and recommend platform specific queries.
Our curation blueprint has evolved into a reliable, repeatable process that anyone can use. This tool doesn’t replace our human curators… It gives them a head start!
For our customers it’s a cost-effective way to move from a blank page to a curated project in under an hour.
AI for Good
What began as a curatorial survival strategy has evolved into an AI system that thinks the way our best curators do, because it was built from their unique expertise. Content Genie makes it faster than ever for storytellers to find brief-relevant, human-made content and, in the process, unlocks more licensing opportunities for creators everywhere!
