Remember when the PPC manager was the most important person on your marketing team?
Whoever could “make Meta ads work” or “crack Google Ads ROI” literally drove the business. Every brand was obsessed with performance marketing — find the right audience, hit the right target, tweak the right bid. Clicks, conversions, ROAS…
And just when we thought we finally had all the data we needed, the rules changed.
Turns out, people don’t want to be targeted anymore. They want to be understood. They want brands to see the world through their eyes, read the books they read, laugh at the memes they share, and care about what they care about.
In 2025, the most important person on your team isn’t the one optimizing bids — it’s the one who knows what resonates with your audience. Any audience, actually. At any moment in time, anywhere in the world.
Zazmic met that person. And together, we built the AI-powered tool to make it happen.
Measuring What Metrics Can’t
So, what actually makes a brand culturally relevant?
That’s the question 20-year brand expert Charles Swann — who’s worked with market leaders like Apple, Google, and Coca-Cola — set out to answer when he started building Forage.
Every great campaign — every great product, really — starts with a single human truth.
But uncovering that truth — the one that cuts through noise and connects at a human level — is incredibly hard. To find it, brands have to move fast: understand their audience, size the opportunity, spot what competitors are doing, and turn a flood of cultural signals into something meaningful.
And here’s the challenge:
“Culture is so complicated and fragmented, and it’s moving so fast, it’s nearly impossible for brands to keep up,” explains Charles on our recent episode of AI & Beyond for Business.
“Ten years ago, you could have four weeks to find an insight and that would be fast. Today, two weeks feels like forever.”
In a world where trends pop, peak, and die overnight, most brands fall behind — because by the time they react, the moment’s already gone.
“It’s no longer about what’s happening this quarter,” Charles continues.
“It’s what’s happening this week among a niche group of people in a part of the world you don’t even have visibility into.”
Imagine a brand sitting in New York trying to figure out how a trend will show up among young women in Japan.
That’s exactly what Forage is built to solve.
Forage isn’t just another analytics tool. It’s an AI-powered cultural intelligence engine that reads the social landscape at scale — across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. From memes to micro-trends, influencer posts to viral videos, Forage decodes millions of images and videos to surface the subtle cues, emotions, and human truths that drive authentic brand storytelling.
In other words, it helps brands see culture, understand it, and respond in real time — instead of reacting to outdated assumptions.
How We Engineered an AI-to-Ad Platform on GCP
Where there’s inhuman speed and scale, there’s powerful AI at work.
When Charles came to Zazmic, he already had the vision for Forage — and the AI models proving it could work. What he needed was an engineering team with deep AI experience to turn that prototype into a scalable, enterprise-grade platform.
“The challenge isn’t just teaching AI to see what’s in a picture or video — it’s teaching it to understand what’s actually happening, and why,” says Yann Kronberg, CTO of Zazmic.
“AI is great at recognizing what something is. But understanding why it matters — what people are doing, what they might do next, what it means in context — that’s where it gets complex. That’s what we’ve been building with Forage.”
Together with Forage, the Zazmic team engineered a full-scale AI-powered cultural intelligence engine — one that doesn’t just scan content, but interprets it.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
From Recognition to Meaning
Traditional AI can label objects — “coffee cup,” “running shoes,” “sunset.”
Forage’s AI goes further. It reads behavior and emotion: are people celebrating, relaxing, protesting, or performing a ritual?
AI with Memory and Context (RAG)
Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation, the system connects visual insights with real-world cultural data — understanding not just isolated content, but how it fits into trends, movements, and micro-communities.
End-to-End Ad Intelligence Pipeline
From ingesting billions of images and videos to turning them into actionable brand insights, Zazmic built a multi-layered infrastructure combining:
- GCP-based orchestration with Cloud Composer and BigQuery
- Gemini 1.5 for generative brief creation
- Imagen for text-to-image generation
- Meta Ads API for seamless campaign deployment
Semantic Search for Culture
Beyond keywords, the platform enables semantic search — meaning a marketer can explore “joy around coffee culture in Seoul” and get real, image-based insights, not just hashtags.
The more the platform runs, the smarter it gets. It’s the first time brands can go from cultural signal to live campaign in a single, automated flow.
Why Forage Runs on GCP
“Forage depends on being able to analyze both video and image in the same process — and Google Cloud’s Gemini is the best platform that can natively do that,” Charles explains.
“It’s faster, cheaper, and easier to integrate than anything else out there.”
GCP’s philosophy of simple, seamless integration made it a natural fit for Forage. With Google’s Agent Development Kit and a RAG-powered database, Forage’s AI agents can surface insights that help brands move from data to decision in hours — not weeks.
Launching Campaigns on Data, Not Gut
Every data point Forage uncovers — it turns into action.
Take this example: a client once asked, “What does a ‘side quest’ look like in real life for Gen Z and Gen Alpha?”
Forage analyzed thousands of social posts and found that a “side quest” isn’t about extreme adventure — it’s about comfortable but elevated experiences. Think pausing at the fanciest McDonald’s in Paris, for example.
That insight completely changed the client’s creative direction.
Instead of pushing an over-the-top adventure narrative, they built campaigns that resonated instantly — because they reflected how the audience actually lives, not how marketers imagined they did.
Traditionally, insights like this would take a research agency weeks or even months to uncover — by which time the moment would have passed. With Forage, brands can detect a trend on Monday and build creative around it by Friday.
Because the platform understands culture both visually and semantically — across geographies and languages — it helps teams test narratives faster, localize campaigns intelligently, and move with the pulse of real-time behavior.
It’s the difference between chasing trends and creating relevance.
AI That Moves Business
Forage shows what happens when AI moves beyond automation and starts driving real business impact. The same principles apply across industries — understanding patterns, predicting context, and turning insight into faster, smarter decisions.
At Zazmic, we partner with innovators like Forage to bring those ideas to life — engineering custom AI systems that bridge data and creativity.
Your AI could be next. Let’s build it together. Book a call with our experts today!
