From Curator's Intuition to AI Precision

Written by Liz Mandeville - Product Manager and Head of Curation, Catch+Release

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Whether you are a small business owner running your own social channels or a creative director at a global agency, the pressure is the same: you need access to compelling content. We all know that staged stock photography doesn’t resonate the way it used to. Audiences prefer unique, human-made moments that tell a genuine story.
But finding that content in the vast noise of the internet is exhausting, and ensuring it is safe and legal to use in advertising can be difficult.

That is why we built Content Genie. We wanted to create a tool that allows marketers of any size to access authentic, safe-to-license user-generated content (UGC). But we didn't just invent this technology out of thin air, it was born from years of struggle to find content and the expertise to know if it is licensable.
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 Instagram, Facebook and others became extremely popular… and the desire for “real content” was loud and clear.  Research requests started to become way more critical. We started hearing “no model-looking people" “we need CANDID moments” “we’re looking for regular people” “need way more diversity”. Marketers demanded User Generated Content.
And just as massive amounts of “UGC” exploded on the internet, I joined Catch+Release, as a content curator. The shift from searching 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 impossible at times.
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The Curation Blueprint

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From that chaos, we built a process.
The first step in the process was to understand “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’d 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 around the 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 800+ brands, and thousands of projects, resulting in approaching $100 million dollars paid to creators. This framework became the foundation for our new AI-powered search tool.
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Scaling our Search-Superpowers

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To provide Customers “easy access” to unique authentic content we've built a network of AI agents that operate on the same principles our curators use. 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.
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.
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AI for Good

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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 is built on years of human intuition and platform fluency.  We’ve done the hard work of learning how to search the wild, so you can focus on what matters most: telling a great story.
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!

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