Sparks & Honey
Sparks & Honey, a leading cultural intelligence consultancy and part of Omnicom Precision Marketing Group, helps organizations decode global shifts and future-proof their strategies. Their proprietary platform, Q™, serves as the engine behind their insights—an AI-powered system that quantifies and visualizes emerging trends in real time. As their clients’ needs evolved, so did the demands placed on Q™. The system required not just maintenance, but a comprehensive modernization to support growing usage, deeper insight generation, and generative AI capabilities across high-profile briefings and reports.
Azumo partnered with Sparks & Honey to rebuild the Q™ platform from the inside out—starting with critical legacy support and ending with a fully modular, future-ready platform capable of powering 24/7 insights, custom reporting, and real-time generative content.
The Challenge
When Sparks & Honey engaged Azumo, Q™ was already a powerful tool, but its architecture and tooling were beginning to limit its potential. At the heart of the challenge was a legacy Python application that needed active maintenance to stay functional and stable. It required immediate break/fix support as well as front-end enhancements to improve usability for analysts and clients. Despite its proven track record, the platform’s monolithic structure made rapid updates nearly impossible and created friction when responding to client-specific demands.
Improving insight quality meant improving the data. Sparks & Honey needed a better system for ingesting timely, relevant cultural signals—especially from sources beyond traditional APIs. Manual processes and static inputs were no longer enough to generate the forward-looking analysis Q™ was known for.
At the same time, Sparks & Honey was looking to expand how Q™ contributed to their live briefings, reports, and public-facing outputs. They envisioned a future where generative AI could support the creative process—before, during, and after each engagement. But integrating LLMs and automating outputs required structural changes, custom tooling, and thoughtful orchestration across data, design, and delivery.
Behind every huge business win is a team win, a coalition win, and a technology win. So it is worth pointing out the teams, stacks, and packages we've been using to achieve low-latency and real-time GenAI on our 24/7 platform and live in our studios … and it all came together with a fantastic set of developers from Azumo.
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The Solution
The work unfolded in phases, beginning with stabilization and expanding into redesign, rebuild, and AI integration.
Azumo started by performing a comprehensive audit of the existing Q™ application, assessing technical debt, infrastructure gaps, and documentation needs. The team then provided targeted break/fix support to ensure uninterrupted operation, while also enhancing the frontend with new features that made the platform more intuitive for end users. To improve data ingestion, Azumo developed custom scrapers tailored to Sparks & Honey’s needs—enabling access to previously untapped sources and improving the volume and quality of cultural signals feeding into Q™.
From there, the engagement shifted into architectural redesign. Azumo decomposed the monolithic structure into a modular system, making it easier to implement new features, respond to client demands, and deploy updates without risk to the whole application. The frontend and backend were fully separated, allowing teams to work independently and deploy more frequently. A rebuilt version of Q™ included new features like predictive trend charts—visual tools that supported Sparks & Honey’s core mission of forecasting cultural shifts with confidence.
As part of its modernization, the platform was extended with generative AI capabilities. During briefing preparation, Azumo helped create prompt sheets and question scripts for internal teams, helping structure client narratives in advance. In live sessions, generative models produced real-time transcripts, summaries, word clouds, and follow-up questions—enhancing both engagement and content capture. After each event, the AI-generated takeaways were repurposed into social content and client-ready summaries, enabling Sparks & Honey to scale their thought leadership efficiently.
In the final stages, Azumo focused on extending these improvements to client-specific deliverables. The team supported the creation of tailored pitch decks, flash reports, and audience-specific insight packages for major Omnicom clients. Using input data, baseline questions, and language models, Azumo helped develop highly targeted content for different industries, all aligned to Omnicom’s design system and branding. A frontend refresh ensured that the entire Q™ experience—from user interface to exported report—was consistent, usable, and on-brand.
Results
The collaboration between Sparks and Honey and Azumo yielded significant outcomes:
- Enhanced Application: The Q™ application was transformed, becoming more agile, feature-rich, and aligned with client needs, all while maintaining its design integrity.
- Data Accuracy: Custom data scrapers and enhancements led to improved data ingestion, resulting in more accurate cultural insights.
- Efficiency: The separation of frontend and backend components allowed for faster updates and feature additions, enhancing overall efficiency.
- Insightful Briefings: Generative AI-powered support during briefings improved the quality and depth of insights shared with clients.
- Tailored Reports: Sparks and Honey could provide highly customized reports to Omnicom clients, increasing the relevance and impact of their cultural intelligence.
The Sparks & Honey engagement illustrates how rebuilding legacy systems with modular architecture and AI integration can unlock meaningful transformation. By modernizing the Q™ platform, Azumo delivered a more scalable, insight-driven toolset—equipped for real-time performance, richer data, and generative content creation.
This case study demonstrates how strategic engineering and close partnership can reshape the future of cultural intelligence—proving that great insights begin with great systems.
