In the hyper-competitive and visually driven world of beauty marketing, the search for the perfect influencer has long been a frustrating exercise in compromise, forcing brands to navigate a sea of superficial metrics that rarely capture the essence of genuine compatibility. The South Korean artificial intelligence company VAIV is aiming to resolve this persistent industry challenge with WHOTAG, a sophisticated platform engineered to transform influencer discovery from a subjective, labor-intensive process into a precise, data-driven science. Spearheaded by Chief Strategy Officer Hannah Baek, the platform moves beyond follower counts and engagement rates to analyze the subtle, culturally rich signals that define a true brand fit, empowering marketers to connect with creators who not only have reach but also authentically embody their brand’s unique vibe and ethos.
Moving Beyond Follower Counts
The Problem with Traditional Discovery
For many years, marketing professionals have been confined by the limitations of conventional influencer discovery tools, which primarily rely on surface-level metrics like follower statistics, engagement percentages, and rudimentary hashtag filtering. This traditional methodology is notoriously inefficient and frequently proves unreliable, compelling brands to invest significant time and financial resources into manual searches that often culminate in partnerships feeling misaligned or fundamentally “off-brand.” Hannah Baek articulates this widespread industry frustration, emphasizing that the most critical question—whether a creator’s intrinsic “tone and vibe” truly harmonizes with the brand’s identity—often remains unanswered by existing platforms. This gap forces marketing teams to undertake exhaustive manual vetting processes, sifting through countless profiles in the hopes of finding a creator whose aesthetic and values resonate, a task that is both unsustainable and prone to subjective error.
To directly confront this deep-seated issue, WHOTAG was developed around a proprietary multimodal AI system known as “GPT Profiling.” This advanced technology represents a significant leap forward from simple automated filtering. The system was meticulously trained on the vast and intricate ecosystem of global beauty content, creator behaviors, and consumer interactions. Unlike its predecessors, which are limited to processing quantitative data, GPT Profiling is engineered to analyze and interpret a rich tapestry of qualitative elements. It delves into visual aesthetics, cultural context, and the subtle behavioral patterns embedded within a creator’s content. By understanding these nuanced signals, the platform can move past the numbers to identify creators who exhibit genuine, holistic compatibility with a brand, offering a more reliable and insightful path to forming authentic partnerships that resonate deeply with target audiences.
A New Way to Search
The operational mechanics of WHOTAG signify a radical departure from the conventional, filter-based dashboards that have long dominated the influencer marketing landscape. At the core of the platform is a sophisticated natural-language discovery interface, a feature that empowers marketers to articulate their ideal influencer profile using plain, descriptive language, transcending linguistic barriers. For example, a user can input a highly specific and nuanced query such as “Hong Kong-based skincare micro-creators posting minimalist routines” and, within seconds, receive a meticulously curated list of relevant creators who fit this detailed description. This functionality is powered by the platform’s GPT Profiling engine, which seamlessly processes a combination of text and visual data to accurately interpret the user’s intent and deliver highly targeted results that would be nearly impossible to obtain through standard filtering methods.
This innovative methodology fundamentally inverts the traditional workflow that has long defined influencer discovery. Instead of forcing marketers to adapt their complex and nuanced requirements to the rigid, predefined constraints of software filters, WHOTAG compels the technology to adapt to the marketer’s specific and descriptive language. The AI engine deciphers the intricate aesthetic and cultural nuances embedded within a search query—discerning, for instance, what the concept of “minimalist” looks like within the specific cultural context of Hong Kong—and cross-references this interpretation against its expansive database of creator profiles. This user-centric approach not only streamlines the discovery process, saving immense time and resources, but it also opens up new possibilities for brands to find niche, highly-aligned creators in global markets who might have otherwise remained undiscovered through conventional search tactics.
A Strategic Focus on Beauty
Why Start with the Most Complex Industry
The decision to launch WHOTAG with an exclusive focus on the beauty industry was not an arbitrary one but a calculated move informed by rigorous data analysis and strategic market intelligence. Hannah Baek explains that during the intensive development phase of the GPT Profiling technology, the company’s internal data revealed a compelling pattern: over 80% of the most potent and predictive creator signals, content patterns, and consumer engagement metrics originated from the beauty sector. This significant internal finding was subsequently corroborated by Meta, an official partner, which confirmed that beauty stands as the largest and most dynamic creator category by a substantial margin. This data-driven insight provided a clear directive, positioning the beauty industry as the ideal incubator for a technology designed to understand complex, context-dependent human expression and aesthetic preferences.
Furthermore, the beauty industry presents a uniquely complex and challenging environment for influencer discovery, making it the perfect stress test for an advanced AI system. Consumer preferences and the interpretation of common terminology—such as “glow,” “natural look,” or “high coverage”—can vary dramatically across different regions, cultures, and even subcultures. By choosing to tackle what Baek describes as the “hardest, most nuanced problem” first, WHOTAG aims to build a robust, sophisticated, and culturally intelligent foundation. This strategic approach is designed to ensure the AI’s core capabilities are honed in the most demanding vertical. The successful refinement of the platform within this complex ecosystem will pave the way for a more seamless and effective expansion into other consumer verticals, establishing beauty as the strategic starting point for a much broader and more ambitious long-term roadmap.
Redefining Brand Fit and Influence
At the heart of WHOTAG’s philosophy is a fundamental redefinition of what constitutes “brand fit.” The platform operates on the premise that true compatibility extends far beyond surface-level aesthetics and is determined by a multitude of intricate signals that are often invisible to conventional analytical tools. The AI is meticulously designed to evaluate a deep and varied set of indicators extracted directly from a creator’s content and audience engagement. These include tangible attributes like the creator’s specific skin type, documented skin concerns, and clear product affinities, which the system can infer even when not explicitly stated in posts or bios. This capability allows brands to find influencers whose personal needs and preferences align perfectly with their product offerings, leading to more authentic and credible endorsements.
Beyond these content-centric signals, the platform also assesses a comprehensive range of risk and alignment factors that are increasingly vital for brands seeking to protect their reputation and ensure authentic partnerships. The system analyzes a creator’s potential involvement in social-impact communities, flags the presence of potential ethical risks, quantifies the volume of their existing brand collaborations, and provides a detailed history of their past partnerships. This holistic evaluation provides a 360-degree view of a creator, enabling marketers to make more informed decisions. The insights gleaned from WHOTAG’s extensive global beta phase, which spanned 109 countries, underscored the platform’s value by revealing that influence is far more localized than commonly assumed. This discovery led many brands to identify high-potential, brand-aligned creators in new international markets they had never previously considered.
The Future of Influencer Intelligence
From Discovery to Prediction
WHOTAG is strategically positioned as more than just an advanced discovery tool; it is being developed as an evolving intelligence platform with capabilities that extend into real-time analytics and, ultimately, predictive strategy. In its current form, the platform already empowers marketers to surface complex insights with remarkable speed. Users can identify the early signals of emerging trends across different geographical regions, analyze precisely how specific audience demographics react to various content styles, and accurately map the overlap between a creator’s followers and a competitor’s customer base. These analytics provide a deeper understanding of the market landscape, allowing brands to refine their strategies based on real-time, data-driven intelligence rather than relying on historical data or intuition.
The long-term vision for the platform is to leverage its powerful AI to help marketers forecast which creators are most likely to drive specific business outcomes, such as conversion rates or brand awareness, for a particular campaign. It aims to predict which aesthetic trends will gain traction in upcoming seasons and determine which geographical markets will be most receptive to particular product benefits or messaging. This expansion of capabilities is designed to answer highly specific market research questions on demand, such as how different demographics verbally describe product textures or articulate their unique beauty needs. By evolving from a discovery engine into a predictive one, WHOTAG seeks to provide brands with the foresight needed to plan proactive, culturally attuned campaigns that anticipate market shifts rather than merely reacting to them.
The WHOTAG Difference
A clear distinction was drawn between WHOTAG’s technology and the broader, often diluted use of the term “AI-powered” that has become commonplace in the influencer marketing space. Hannah Baek posited that the majority of competing services merely use artificial intelligence for basic automated filtering or content tagging, processes that can organize data but lack the capacity for true comprehension. The platform’s substantive differentiation, she argued, lay in its proven ability to interpret data with deep contextual awareness. This was achieved by synergizing the advanced reasoning capabilities inherent in GPT technology with a set of proprietary prompts and analytical models shaped by two decades of specialized research expertise within the global beauty domain. This unique synthesis gave the AI an unparalleled understanding of the industry’s nuances.
This innovative combination of cutting-edge language models and domain-specific knowledge allowed the AI to perceive and understand creators not merely as media channels or advertising platforms, but as complex beauty consumers in their own right. The overarching vision for WHOTAG was to facilitate a significant paradigm shift across the industry, moving the focus away from a simplistic pursuit of fame and high follower counts toward a more strategic and meaningful search for creators who could serve as convincing, authentic, and culturally resonant representatives for a brand in any given market. Ultimately, the development of WHOTAG represented the initial phase of a larger mission: to evolve the platform into a comprehensive Beauty Intelligence engine that empowered brands to plan, predict, and localize their global strategies with an unprecedented level of cultural precision and data-backed confidence.
