WTF are synthetic audiences?
What if you could test a new product idea and get your audience’s reaction before launching, without bothering real people?
Well, now you can, with synthetic audiences.
The process involves taking a publisher or brand’s audience dataset and using AI to create a copy of those audience behavior patterns to use for market research.
It’s a new term coming to light this year in the media and advertising industries. And though not everyone is comfortable with the way “synthetic audiences” sounds (perhaps too reminiscent of “fake” at a time when AI slop is rampant), it’s a practice that publishers like The Times are finding useful to test ideas behind product launches and editorial initiatives – and ad agencies like Dentsu are using to test media planning and audience targeting – for faster and cheaper.
I’ve heard the terms synthetic data and synthetic research used – are these the same as synthetic audiences?
Pretty much. Like many new-fangled terms born out of new technological capabilities, there is more than one way to refer to it. Synthetic data/research is the umbrella term to describe using AI to create data mimicking the real data it’s given.
Synthetic audiences refer more specifically to a panel trained on human behavior data, usually from CRMs or human-conducted surveys. Synthetic audiences refer specifically to simulating an audience group and its different cohorts, also called “digital twinning.”
Typically, when a publisher or brand wants to conduct market research, they have to…
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