Selected work · Case study
The Moment System
I designed and built an AI-assisted pipeline that ensures no brand partnership opportunity is missed. It turns a talent client's cultural moment into a same-day, decision-ready brand-partnership brief, so the agency acts inside the leverage window.
Anonymized portfolio case study. All client names, brand names, contacts, and rate details have been removed or generalized. This describes a system I designed and built during a branding internship at a major talent agency.
- Role
- Branding and brand-partnerships intern. Owned end to end.
- Timeline
- Designed and shipped into a 60-day pilot over roughly four weeks.
- Stack
- Structured data store, scheduled AI agents, vendor collection APIs.
- Status
- Design complete, data store live, roster loaded, in a scoped 60-day pilot.
01
The problem
When a client breaks through culturally, a viral post, a red-carpet look, a news beat, the department usually knows within a day. The value does not leak at detection. It leaks in the 48 to 72 hours after, when the team scrambles on rates and targets while the leverage window closes. By the time outreach is ready, the moment has cooled.
The real bottleneck was readiness, not detection.
02
What I built
- A six-table data model as the system of record: a watchlist, a signals staging table, a metrics history table (the time series that makes per-client baselines possible), a brand directory, an events calendar, and the moment briefs queue.
- The real client roster loaded and structured, with social handles auto-extracted for the large majority and the rest flagged for manual fill.
- A daily automated analysis pass, prototyped end to end, that computes velocity against baseline, flags spikes, classifies moment type, matches against approved lists only, writes a brief, and prepares a draft.
- A brand-targeting taxonomy on four axes (audience, season and timing, vibe and context, and vertical fit) so a moment's tags filter the directory directly instead of relying on guesswork.
- A daily digest formatted for a 30-second phone scan: a one-line summary first, then moment blocks with only the decisive numbers, then a short watch list, then any data-quality flags, then only the items that actually need a human.
- A full architecture blueprint with a connector-by-connector evaluation separating what is load-bearing from what is expansion, plus the enterprise comparison to anchor a future budget ask.
03
How it works
Two moving parts, and a human at exactly two checkpoints.
Collection runs outside the AI. A vendor-side scheduler scrapes each watchlisted client's public social activity daily and lands it in the data store. Press mentions arrive through free alerts. This layer deliberately does not depend on anyone's laptop being open or any single person's attention.
Judgment runs inside a daily AI pass. One scheduled analysis task fires each morning. It measures each client's engagement against that client's own trailing 30-day baseline rather than a fixed follower threshold, so a genuine spike registers at any audience size. It flags anything crossing the moment threshold, classifies the moment type, and matches it against an approved brand directory and a forward events calendar. It never invents brand names. It assembles a moment brief, numbers, moment type, best-fit brand matches with the relationship owner named, relevant upcoming events, and leaves a ready-to-send draft.
The human checkpoint is about 15 minutes each morning. Kill false positives, polish, forward. A weekly pass adds a hit-rate scorecard; a monthly pass looks 8 to 12 weeks ahead at the events calendar. A freshness check means a broken pipeline announces itself with an alert instead of failing silently.
04
Architecture principle
Collection outside the AI, judgment inside it, data in the department's own system, and humans at exactly two checkpoints. No component depends on a personal laptop. Just as important: no single failure produces wrong output. Failures produce missing output, which is detectable, rather than confident nonsense that gets forwarded to senior agents.
No single failure produces wrong output. Failures produce missing output, which is detectable, rather than confident nonsense that gets forwarded to senior agents.
05
The daily loop
From raw signal to a note a person can send, once every morning.
- Collect each watchlisted client's public activity.
- Measure against that client's own 30-day baseline.
- Flag spikes that cross the moment threshold.
- Classify the moment type.
- Match to the approved brand directory and events calendar.
- Assemble a decision-ready brief with a draft.
- Human review, about 15 minutes, then forward.
A freshness check alerts on a stale feed, so silence never masquerades as calm.
06
The judgment calls
Made before any tooling. They held up through the entire build.
Moments are not events.
Reactive moment monetization and calendar-driven event placement (fashion weeks, awards season) are different problems on different clocks. Events run on known dates and should be planned into ahead of time, whether or not a client is trending. Moments are time-critical and reactive. I split them into separate workflows so neither compromised the other.
Do not automate outreach.
Every brand suggestion is human-reviewed and every note is human-sent. The system drafts; a person decides and presses send. This was a design principle, not a limitation. It keeps a human accountable at the two points where judgment and relationships matter.
Value ranking: readiness first.
Monitoring and matching are the visible parts, but the durable value sits in a well-kept, brand-indexed directory of relationships the agency already holds. Most of that already existed internally. The honest ask was "keep it current," not "build it from scratch," which is a far easier internal conversation.
The system drafts; a person decides and presses send.
07
What I designed for that most people skip
Data governance first.
A brand-relationship directory with contacts and rates is commercially sensitive agency data. I insisted it live in department-owned systems, built for handover, with ownership and origin raised with my manager before the system produced its first brief, rather than accumulating inside personal accounts. A department asset I built and documented is a stronger story, and a safer one, than a clever tool that only I can run and that leaves when I do.
Zero maintenance, not zero involvement.
The tempting pitch is a fully autonomous system. The honest and better target is a system that needs no upkeep but keeps a person in the loop for the 15 minutes a day where the judgment and the credit live.
08
Skills demonstrated
- Systems thinking and product judgment
- Practical AI and automation
- Structured data stores and scheduled agents
- Vendor API evaluation
- Cost discipline
- Data governance and handover awareness
- Cross-functional and internal navigation
- Talent brand-partnerships fluency
- The entertainment calendar