Know Your Audience

Synthetic audiences are everywhere now, but the question that actually decides whether one is worth trusting is rarely asked: how much of a real person does the model need before it behaves like the original? In a Columbia study, more than two thousand people each answered five hundred questions about themselves and an AI twin was built of every one , and the twins reproduced people’s held-out ans...

Large language models are now embedded in how many brands do market research — simulate consumer responses, get results in hours instead of weeks, at a fraction of the cost. But a rigorous Harvard Business School and Microsoft Research working paper finds that LLM-based preference estimates are realistic in some contexts and wrong-signed in others — with estimates sometimes off by a factor of thre...

Synthetic respondents have gone mainstream — AI stand-ins for your customers you can question without recruiting anyone, a focus group that never closes. But not all of them are worth listening to, and this episode is about what actually decides that: not the fact that they never end, but the depth and realness of the data the model is built on, and whether it was built for the job you’re asking i...

For decades, brands have understood their customers through age, gender, and income — but those categories are losing their power to predict what people actually do. This episode of Know Your Audience digs into Adobe’s 2026 consumer research , where a survey of four thousand people found that attitudes toward AI tracked comfort with the technology far more than any demographic line, and into recap...

Two findings from the same week tell one story. Consumers say seven in ten AI-made ads are missing their soul , while marketers are being told the smartest investment isn't creative at all but the metadata that lets AI systems understand a brand . Put together, they reveal that brands now serve two audiences with opposite taste: the human who wants soul, and the machine that decides whether the hu...

Braze’s twenty twenty-six Global Customer Engagement Review found that ninety-three percent of marketing leaders believe AI helps them accurately understand customer needs — but only fifty-three percent of consumers agree brands are successfully predicting their wants. That forty-point confidence gap is this episode’s starting point. New academic research from Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft suggest...

The fastest-growing AI habit among consumers isn’t creating content or learning new skills — it’s shopping. Forty-two percent of consumers used AI to shop in the past month. Product discovery is the single highest-adoption personal AI task tracked across fifty-four categories, and it’s the only one that’s both widespread and still growing. Your consumer is comparing options, interpreting reviews,...

The CX platforms that many brands depend on are under serious financial pressure — Medallia’s five-billion-dollar equity wipeout is the most visible example, but the structural forces behind it apply across the category. At the same time, the CMO role itself is being redefined: Forrester’s latest report argues that AI is pushing marketing leaders from campaign execution into enterprise growth orch...

The way brands understand their customers is changing in ways that are measurable, funded, and accelerating. This particular week made the case hard to ignore — a seventy-million-dollar revenue attribution, a public reckoning with the dominant methodology, and three new entrants in the synthetic audience space, all in seven days. Show Notes: TruGreen and conversational AI feedback Interview with V...