Why agencies are taking a hybrid approach to synthetic audience research

Traditional research can be slow, expensive and hard to scale but agencies are increasingly testing AI-generated personas to supplement things like media planning and concept testing. In theory, the pitch makes sense: Synthetic audiences can model real consumer behavior, pressure-test ideas and uncover insights without the long wait times that come with human focus groups. In reality, it’s a harder sell. Synthetic audiences are only as good as the data they’re built on. Even if a project needed to launch right away, a fully synthetic data set would only take the project 80% over the line, leaving the remaining 20% to be vetted by real…

This is a curated summary. The full story was reported by Digiday.