Most social media monitoring was built to find words. That worked when online conversation moved through posts, comments, and threads. It works less well in a short-form video environment where a brand can appear on screen, become part of a joke, or get pulled into a political narrative without ever being named. 

Ofer Familier has been watching that gap widen since co-founding dig in 2021. A former software engineer at Intel and management consultant at McKinsey, he launched the company as Gloss AI, initially helping brands repurpose long-form content into short-form social campaigns. As global instabilities intensified and short-form video became an increasingly important place where narratives about brands, governments, and products take shape, the company pivoted entirely into social video intelligence.

dig’s enterprise platform now claims over 90% coverage of brand-related social video across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms, serving large brands and governments that need continuous reputation monitoring. In April 2026, dig launched ask dig, a self-serve AI search product that accepts a plain-language question and returns a sourced answer drawn from social in just two minutes.

“We all feel this pain as individuals and as brands,” Ofer says. “Suddenly seeing something and not knowing: is it real, is it not real? We couldn’t resist trying to solve a problem that feels like one of the biggest problems in the world today.”

An Industry Built for an Internet That No Longer Leads

The social intelligence market developed its core architecture when Twitter threads and Facebook posts defined online discourse. That architecture was fundamentally text-based: platforms ingested written content, ran keyword or phrase searches, and surfaced relevant mentions. In Ofer’s view, the underlying logic, built 25 years ago and left largely unchanged, was never designed to process a world where the dominant form of public expression is short-form vertical video.

“You give the system a script,” he explains. “You say, ‘If this word appears, and then later in the sentence this word appears, I want to know about it.’ Living in the GPT world now, it looks like the 1980s.”

The failure becomes structural when applied to video. A person discussing a brand might never verbally mention its name; the context lives in visuals, tone, and implied narrative that no keyword lookup can parse. dig’s response was to replace keyword searches with what Ofer calls a “narrative brief”. Users describe what they want to learn, and the system identifies whether a given video’s underlying message matches that intent, regardless of specific wording.

“This complete conceptual change was mandatory in order to get to what we’re able to deliver today,” he says. “Something that gives every brand the ability to say, ‘I want to learn about this,’ and be certain they’ll find almost everything.”

The 50% Share Drop That No Alert Could Have Caught

The stakes become clearest in a case Ofer describes involving one of the world’s largest gaming companies. Before every major launch, the company noticed a repeating pattern: roughly three months out, a social crisis would emerge from nowhere, suppress expectations, and damage opening-week results. Over two years, the company’s share price fell more than 50%.

“They called us because they didn’t even know how to start looking at this,” Ofer says. “We helped them understand it was a coordinated attack. There were parties with interests in getting their share price to drop, and they were doing it systematically.”

dig mapped where the narratives originated, which accounts were amplifying them, and where intervention was still possible. Speed proved the decisive variable. On TikTok, a narrative develops and entrenches within days. “If you’re not out there to call it out or disprove it the same day, you’re way too late,” Ofer notes. “All the processes are typically much longer, and they only discover it later.”

The case is an extreme version of a more pervasive problem. Brands missing hundreds of thousands of TikTok posts about their products are also missing how their identity is being reshaped, what consumers in specific markets actually think, and whether the associations forming around the brand are the ones they intended. “Especially if you start going into what Gen Z thinks,” Ofer adds. “These are substantial blind spots.”

A Query in a Minute, Not a Dashboard That Takes a Week

ask dig is positioned as a faster, more accessible version of the full dig platform. Where the enterprise product provides continuous monitoring at near-total scale, ask dig processes roughly 500 to 1,000 posts per query and delivers a synthesized, source-linked answer in approximately one minute, according to Ofer. The platform launched on TikTok and is now expanding to additional networks.

“If the dig platform brings you everything, ask dig gives you a very good sample, but it gives it to you in a minute,” Ofer says. “Imagine ChatGPT, but instead of looking into websites, it looks into social media.”

Every response is linked directly to the original posts driving it, so users can trace the answer to specific content rather than a probabilistic model. The platform also filters sponsored posts and detects synthetic activity to surface organic reactions. The same detection capability applies to coordinated narratives: knowing whether a trend is artificial helps determine how to respond and what to expect next, though Ofer notes that even manufactured trends require a response, because their impact on perception can be identical to authentic ones.

The use cases span a wide range of users. An influencer can query what’s trending in jewelry in Belgium among Gen Z before planning content. A brand manager can check daily how consumers are reacting to a product launch. A journalist can map how a breaking story is landing in a specific city.

The Source Problem That Makes ChatGPT Unreliable for This

Ofer’s core argument against general-purpose AI tools comes down to sourcing. ChatGPT and similar LLMs pull from indexed web content, including news articles and review sites. Both carry structural biases: paid placements, editorial agendas, and significant lag between the moment a conversation happens and when it gets documented anywhere on the public web.

“If you want to get to the authentic root cause of what people think about a product, ask dig pulls in real opinions,” Ofer says. “In ChatGPT, they typically go to news sites or review sites where people often pay to get something reviewed, or a journalist has some interest in writing it one way or the other.”

The difference becomes most visible at the local and niche level. One early ask dig user in Sri Lanka was searching for a surfboard and trying to find the best surf shop in the country. The platform surfaced answers from local TikTok content that no general AI tool would have indexed. Ofer believes that local intelligence is increasingly where brand decisions need to be grounded. He estimates that more than 80% of what people upload online lives on social media.

“My oldest son is 13,” he says. “When he wants to look up a restaurant, he goes to TikTok and Instagram. He will never go to Google or GPT because he wants to see who’s recommending.”

The Research Method That Needs Replacing

ask dig’s launch sits inside a broader argument about how marketing research has fallen behind where consumer opinion actually lives. For Ofer, the clearest symbol of that failure is the focus group.

“Fifteen years ago, if you wanted to learn what Latin Americans in the U.S. think about something, you would run a focus group and bring one person to represent that group,” he says. “The situation is that’s still what brands do today. We all know it’s almost ridiculous.”

dig is expanding both its enterprise platform and ask dig to additional social networks throughout 2026, with further product announcements planned. The wider objective is making real-time social video intelligence a routine operational input for marketers and researchers, on par with what web search became in the previous era.

“Some things become very influenced by what’s happening in social media,” Ofer says. “It’s been going on for a long time. This is starting to change and balance. I’m really excited about the power shift.”

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