Emplifi Helps Brands Scale Content Processing with Multimodal Semantic Search Powered by Coactive AI

Opportunity | Enhancing Emplifi's Image Processing Capabilities

Emplifi is a leading global unified customer engagement platform that helps over 20,000 brands reach and grow their communities through digital and social-first strategies. 

The Emplifi user-generated content (UGC) platform empowers e-commerce brands to find and share product images created by happy customers. Emplifi automatically aggregates content posted by brand fans online through photo tagging, @mentions, hashtags, or direct upload to their sites. Brand curators then select the assets they want to use, get fan permission to use their content, assign product tags, and then feature the images in shoppable web product galleries or marketing campaigns. “Assigning product tags” is where the challenge arose.

Matching products featured in customer content to the brand’s product catalog requires the curator to have deep knowledge of a catalog that could reach tens of thousands of items. If the curator doesn't possess that knowledge themselves, they would need to manually search the catalog to find the product that the customer was featuring. While this workflow was fine for small brands using the Emplifi UGC platform, the Emplfi product team observed that larger companies were struggling to keep up with tagging, which created content backlogs and prevented them from scaling their UGC initiative.

Emplifi's product team wanted to make it easy for large brands using their platform to accurately match user-generated content to the product catalog. This would make Emplifi a more powerful content management tool for brands, allowing them to create a more engaging shopping experience for their customers. 

Solution | Faster, Smarter Tagging with Coactive AI

Emplifi’s product team partnered with Coactive AI to add powerful, multimodal AI capabilities directly into the existing Emplifi platform and deliver results faster to brand reviewers. This API integration provides Emplifi and its customers access to cutting-edge AI infrastructure that’s fully managed by the Coactive team. 

With the addition of Coactive, brands dramatically improved their product tagging process resulting in better in-platform efficiency. Previously, when tasked with tagging products in UGC images, the brand content curator was limited by the number of products they knew. Now, with Coactive, they can draw a box around the product they want to identify, and the AI will find it. Within seconds, the product is automatically matched to the product catalog, tagged, and ready to be featured in an image gallery. Heidi Eggert, senior product manager at Emplifi added:

“It was important that our visual search-powered product discovery solution provided two key benefits: accuracy and speed. For customers with large product catalogs, efficiency while product tagging is crucial." 

Coactive worked closely with Emplifi during implementation, with daily calls to keep the project moving quickly. The solution went live in one month. During testing and development, Coactive played a key role by integrating Emplifi’s customer product feeds through APIs, allowing Emplifi to match relevant content with specific products and ensuring a smooth launch. 

Outcome | Setting the Stage for Future E-Commerce

Since implementing Coactive, Emplifi UGC has seen a 44 percent month over month increase in product tagging among businesses using the new solution. Eggert remarked:

“Our brands have been able to clear their content backlogs, making their workflows much smoother. We aim to make sure they are spending time in our platform efficiently, and these results show we’re achieving that. It’s like night and day.” 

Looking ahead, the Emplifi UGC team is planning to explore more opportunities to partner with Coactive, such as potentially developing features that can identify a brand’s products on TikTok videos.

Eggert added:

“I always prefer collaborating with external vendors who seamlessly feel like part of our team, working together toward a common goal. With Coactive, our daily communication and weekly calls throughout the implementation process created a remarkably smooth experience.”

About Emplifi

Emplifi is a leading customer experience platform, empowering brands to deliver meaningful, connected experiences across digital channels. Through data-driven insights and AI-powered tools, Emplifi helps brands optimize social media performance and elevate their influencer marketing strategies.

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