Omnicom's cultural consultancy Sparks & Honey is launching a new SaaS platform that it claims can help brands weather disruption, and brands like Dairy Management and EA are already using it

John Wren Omnicom

Omnicom's cultural consultancy Sparks & Honey is rolling out Q, a new self-service SaaS platform that promises to use artificial intelligence to turn cultural trends into actionable insights.
Sparks & Honey says the platform scours through millions of cultural signals around a topic from across the internet.
Q claims it can predict how a cultural trend will evolve with 85% accuracy.
The agency sees Q not only being useful as a cultural component of Omni, Omnicom's data hub, but a separate SaaS platform that can compete with the likes of Adobe and Salesforce.
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Omnicom is betting that it can help its clients predict big, disruptive cultural changes.

The holding company's 8-year-old cultural consultancy Sparks & Honey is rolling out Q, a new self-service SaaS platform that uses artificial intelligence to turn cultural trends into actionable insights.

The platform scours through millions of cultural signals around a topic from across the internet including articles, patents, academic research and platforms including Reddit, Twitter and YouTube, and puts them into cultural buckets based on Sparks & Honey's proprietary taxonomy of cultural trends that it calls the Elements of Culture. Q is also part of Omni, Omnicom's internal data and information technology hub.

"Q comes from the underpinnings of what we've been working on to make sense of culture for eight years," said Sparks & Honey founder and CEO Terry Young. "The idea was to take what we have created and translate that into a technology platform that will allow us to democratize cultural intelligence, not only across Omnicom but also to the clients that we work with."

Q automates strategists' work

Q essentially automates the process of strategists spending months on laborious and costly research, boiling it down to a few hours. Its aggregates data from across 50 countries and 12 languages and shows the past and present cultural Zeitgeist around a trend, producing insights that can inform campaign strategy and product development, Young said.

Here's how it works: When you search for a topic on the platform, it uses natural language processing to identify associated cultural signals and tags them with the corresponding Sparks & Honey "Elements of Culture."

The platform also comes with features like sentiment scores, summaries, and a feature called "Tree Map" that visualizes all the trends adjacent to the search. A search involving White Claw, for instance, might show that the brand is closely linked to "new sobriety" and "refreshed classics."

"The whole point of having algorithms behind this is that we're measuring the reach of every single one of those signals, and it has to cross a certain threshold before it's even included," said Rob Gaige, managing partner of consulting at Sparks & Honey. "That means that we're only pulling in things that are actually culturally relevant."

The agency also claims Q can predict how a cultural trend will evolve with 85% accuracy.

"For the first time, instead of looking back to say what was happening in culture and then trying to project what we should do, we now have a quantified method of projecting forward to say this is what it's going to be," said Gaige.

Clients including EA Sports and Dairy Management Inc. are already using Q

Young sees a use case for Q as the cultural component of Omni and as a separate SaaS platform that Sparks & Honey can sell to compete with the likes of Adobe and Salesforce. He said that the platform was already being used by many of Omnicom's biggest Fortune 500 client that use Omni; Sparks & Honey's own clients like EA Sports and Dairy Management; and other Omnicom agencies internally

One such agency is media agency PHD, which has used Q on multiple new business pitches as well as client projects, said Will Wiseman, the agency's chief strategy officer. PHD used Q to build a communication strategy for a technology brand centered on the insight that people were more drawn to brands that humanized technology rather than touting the technology itself.

"Cultural trends are typically fuzzy and rely on the the subjectivity of the interpreter," Wiseman said. "But Sparks & Honey has created an organizational system that allows us to track it, size it, monetize it and bring accountability to the world of creativity."

Q helps keep an eye on trends in food and beverage, said Eve Pollet, SVP of strategic intelligence at Dairy Management. After it called attention to deep personalization, the dairy collective is trying to apply the trend to its own business.

While it remains to be seen if Q will attract new clients beyond Omnicom's existing ones, the platform is an attempt to modernize its offerings, Forrester analyst Jay Pattisall said.

"It's their way to continue to be able to deliver what their clients expect in a more modern and data-driven way," he said. "But the challenge is that no clients have really talked about a desire to pay extra for these kind of insights; they expect these kind of services from their agencies anyway."

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