• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 17, 2016

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way into all types of media and platforms. The latest is a content search engine that just launched this week.

Since marketers create about six times more content per month these days compared with 10 years ago, social media company Unmetric built a search engine that helps marketers identify what competitors have done.

Discover, a search engine and research tool, aggregates content posted by more than 40,000 brands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram during the last four years, and displays it as tiles in a database.

Marketers can search for content by keywords, time, level of engagement, industry and other parameters such as geography, as well as identify the content or the topics that did well for specific brands such as the most liked piece of content.

"Customers’ interactions with your brand rest on content, whether they are discovering answers to a problem, trying to understand your products, or engaging with your brand or community," writes Forrester Research Analyst Ryan Skinner in a research note titled "Content Marketing Must Support Customer Experience." 

While there are a variety of creative tools, this one focuses on the content and the creative process. Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan, CEO of Unmetric, said the platform presents themes and helps marketers gain ideas to generate their own concepts, especially around important retail events like Father's Day or back-to-school. It also reduces the chance of becoming a content copycat.

"The last thing Target wants to do is redo an ad that Kohls ran last year," Narayan said.

The search engine just launched, but future versions of Discover will determine the success of the content before using it, Narayan said. Today the platform guides decision, but in the future it will help make some of those decisions through artificial intelligence, he said.

The engineering team build the capability to predict engagement and impression values, but has not integrated the code into the platform. That should happen in about three months, Narayan said.