“We could test some really wild ideas that we wouldn’t usually pay a traditional surveyor to do,” said Yasmeen Cohen, global product strategy lead at Mars Wrigley, during a live demo of synthetic audiences at The Drum Live. “We have 75% accuracy in terms of the response rate from the humans [vs] the synthetics, which gives us enough certainty to start expanding this capability and use it as an augmentation of our traditional research.”
Cohen was speaking alongside Paul McCormick, head of digital business at Empathy Lab by EPAM, to spotlight a new chapter in product testing – where synthetic audiences begin to outpace the real thing.
Traditional product research is slow, expensive, and often too limited to keep pace with today’s markets. Now, instead of waiting weeks for focus groups, AI research group tools can spin up synthetic audiences and deliver insights in minutes – as we just saw on stage.
McCormick explained how Empathy Lab’s technology uses generative AI to create lifelike personas capable of responding to product concepts, creative ideas and brand messaging: “This uses generative AI with large language models to create what are called synthetic personas that mimic human-like behaviors. This allows us to gain a depth understanding of the different wants, needs and attitudes of different audiences… significantly reducing time to insight, time to market, and increasing innovation.”
Mars, for example, ran synthetic trials in parallel with human panels and saw more than 75% alignment between the two – with one striking case where the AI’s predictions were actually closer to real consumer behavior than expert forecasts.
But the implications go beyond cost savings. Synthetic audiences could democratize research, allowing brand teams across vast organizations like Mars to test ideas early and often, rather than waiting for limited slots in expensive studies.
As Cohen put it, the goal is to close the gap between what consumers say they want and what they ultimately buy: “Did we get a more accurate source using the synthetics? If anything, what it did is that it gave us enough to understand that there was a delta here that we could explore… So this becomes a big part of the continuous learning that we want to do going forward.”
McCormick was clear that synthetic research isn’t about replacing human studies but augmenting them. “One thing we just really wanted to emphasize with synthetic research is it is not about replacing traditional research, but about augmenting it,” says McCormick. “It’s about empowering brands to be able to do more, to test more ideas, to test more content and creative new product concepts, because you can do it at high speed, low cost and at scale.”
In the race to innovate, the brands who harness synthetic audiences may not just save money: they may move faster, take bigger creative risks, and get closer to consumers than ever before.
Stay tuned for the video of the full session dropping soon on The Drum TV.
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Empathy Lab
Empathy Lab is an Al-native agency launched by EPAM, a leading global provider of digital strategy, engineering, cloud and AI-enabled transformation services. This...