WTF are synthetic audiences?

"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."

"Typically, when a publisher or brand wants to conduct market research, they have to use surveys, focus groups and other data collection processes. With synthetic research, they can copy real audience data to create a virtual dataset to get real-time insights from. The AI systems use inference patterns to provide insights from these "synthetic panelists," according to Cynthia Vega, who leads the integration of AI and analytics across Kantar, a data and consulting company."

Synthetic audiences are AI-generated panels that mimic a publisher or brand's audience behavior by copying audience datasets and modeling behavior patterns. Synthetic data or synthetic research is the umbrella approach of creating AI-driven data that mimics real inputs. Synthetic audiences represent digital twinning of cohorts trained on CRM records or human-conducted surveys. Publishers and ad agencies use synthetic audiences to test product concepts, editorial initiatives, media plans, and targeting faster and more cheaply than traditional surveys or focus groups. AI systems infer patterns to generate real-time insights from virtual panelists. Other forms of synthetic research also exist.

Read at Digiday