What Is a Synthetic Audience?

A synthetic audience is a reusable set of AI personas that represents a target group. When one is applied to an AI Creative Insights evaluation, the creative is assessed through those personas rather than through a general viewer.

Each persona is defined by the traits that shape how a person responds to a creative: their consumer profile, their psychographic and behavioural traits, what motivates them, what they are trying to do, and the criteria they weigh when making a decision. Decode uses these definitions to evaluate the creative from that persona's point of view.

WHAT IT IS USED FOR

A creative rarely performs the same way for every group. A layout that works for a deal-driven shopper may not work for someone buying for a family, and an execution built for one market may not carry in another.

A synthetic audience lets you check that before you commit to a creative. Rather than a single result for a general viewer, you get the evaluation for each persona in the audience, so you can see whether the creative works for the people you are actually targeting.

HOW IT DIFFERS FROM TESTING WITH PARTICIPANTS

A synthetic audience is a modelled audience, not a recruited one. No participants are involved and nothing is collected from real people, so the result is a prediction of how that group would respond based on how the personas are defined.

This makes it fast enough to run across a full set of creatives and useful for narrowing options down. Where you need a measured response from real people, run a study with participants instead.

WHERE IT LIVES

Synthetic audiences are created and managed in Settings, under the Synthetic Audience tab, and they are reusable. An audience you build once can be applied to any AI Creative Insights evaluation afterwards. See Setting up a synthetic audience and Using a synthetic audience in AI Creative Insights.