Every marketing team tests messaging. Very few agree on what "testing" means. One team runs a focus group, another fields a survey panel, a third puts three headlines into paid social and calls the winner. All three are message testing methods, and all three answer different questions at very different costs. This guide covers the…
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A synthetic panel is a group of AI-simulated survey respondents used in place of, or alongside, a traditional research panel. Instead of recruiting real people over weeks, you describe an audience, an AI platform generates simulated panelists, and those panelists answer your questions in minutes. Every synthetic panel produces the same kind of output: clean…
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StatSocial Focus Groups lets brands, agencies, and communications teams run moderated qualitative research with real, weighted audiences. No recruiting. No weeks of fielding. Every respondent is drawn from observed behavioral social data on 150+ million U.S. adults, grounded in StatSocial's patented PeopleGraph, and calibrated against U.S. Census and Pew Research Center benchmarks, so teams know…
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AI surveys can be highly accurate in aggregate when their respondents are grounded in real, observed behavioral data rather than population averages. StatSocial's Digital Twins , for example, have been validated against published benchmarks from Pew Research, Gallup, and Nielsen, averaging 3.3 points of mean absolute error, in comparison to traditional opt-in online panels which…
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Summary at a glance Challenge : Influencer marketing has become a major CPG line item, but most brands still evaluate it on engagement metrics, not actual sales. A leading alcoholic beverage brand ran a combined influencer and paid social campaign and wanted a direct answer: did the spend drive incremental in-store revenue across either channel,…
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Vetting influencers is the process of evaluating a creator before a partnership to confirm they are authentic, brand-safe, and effective. Most teams stop at fraud detection and content review. Advanced vetting adds the missing layer : using identity-resolved data to confirm a creator's real audience matches your target buyers, not just that their followers are…
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The article was originally published by AdExchanger's News Editor, Andrew Byrd on June 9, 2026. View the original article on AdExchanger . Finding the right audience is hard. Finding an audience that barely exists in traditional research panels is even harder. That’s the challenge agencies face when clients want insights into highly specific consumer groups,…
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Few events command the industry's attention quite like Cannes Lions . Every year, marketers from across the industry gather on the Croisette to celebrate creativity, strengthen relationships, explore new partnerships, and make the case that their week in Cannes was time well spent. So is Cannes Lions worth attending? The answer depends entirely on who's…
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Marketers have never had more ways to listen to audiences. They can run panels, analyze social conversations, commission brand studies, review campaign performance, monitor creator communities, and track cultural signals across platforms. The challenge is that most of those methods still take time. And when marketers need fast answers from a very specific audience, traditional…
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A version of this article by Michael Hussey, Founder and President of StatSocial, appeared originally on Advertising Week 360 . Synthetic audiences have become one of the hottest ideas in market research, and for understandable reasons. Traditional research can be expensive, slow, and dependent on panels that are not always as reliable as brands need…
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StatSocial added Substack audience insights to its platform in March 2026. This article was first published on March 17, 2026 and has since been updated. A growing number of creators are building businesses on direct subscriber relationships rather than algorithmic reach, and nowhere is that shift more visible than on Substack. For marketers, it creates…
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Elon Musk called it "The very early stages of the singularity." Andrej Karpathy called it "The most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently," then walked it back days later, calling it "a dumpster fire." MIT Technology Review labeled the whole thing "AI theater." Missing from the conversation–anyone who actually analyzed the data. So…
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