Why Human Insight Remains Crucial in the Age of Synthetic Audiences

Above: AI Generated by the team at Publicis Groupe Hungary using Nano Banana

In a world where everything seems to be moving at the speed of light, tried and trusted processes now feel outdated and terribly slow – like focus groups. Even though in advertising, focus groups are key to gathering valuable behavioural data that build up any winning strategy.

At Publicis Groupe Hungary, strategy has been the most important component to any creative work; and thanks to the agency’s Full Funnel Strategy Team, blind spots are highlighted, and pitfalls are evaded at every turn. But how does the team adapt to the new era of collecting information?

Publicis Groupe Hungary sat down with Megh Baral, digital director, and Eszter Domonkos, brand strategy director, to discuss the latest frontier of their strategic conquest Synthetic Audience aka The Digital Twins.

Read more about the changing of briefs and social listening, and why this bespoke tool is here to stay.

Q> Would you say that traditional focus groups might be in need of a revamp?

Eszter> I’d like to start by stating the obvious: focus groups and ethnographic studies have always been, and still are, the alpha and omega of brand planning, because they give strategists what no dashboard, model, or data stream ever can: unfiltered humanity.

Great planning begins with seeing and hearing people in their real contexts, the way they talk when no one is prompting them, the rituals they don’t think to articulate, the contradictions and tensions that only reveal themselves in lived behaviour. Focus groups, when done well, create the conditions for emotional disclosure and shared cultural meaning; ethnography exposes the gap between what people say and what they do. These are the moments where strategy is born.

They surface the unconscious drivers of decisions, the stories people tell themselves, the subtle emotional cues that fuel distinctive brand platforms and creative leaps. That is why even in the age of big data, brands shouldn’t abandon these methods. Every time we do, the work gets flatter, because we lose the emotional richness that only real human interaction can surface.

That said, while focus groups and ethnographies aren’t disappearing, they are getting squeezed and reshaped. In today’s hyper-compressed timelines and budgets, many clients, and, frankly, sometimes even agencies, see them as too slow, too heavy, too demanding of time and energy. And that’s the tension we’re living in. The industry still needs deep human understanding, but the system increasingly has no patience for the methods that generate it.

Q> When trends are changing overnight – is there a way to outpace the speed of social culture?

Eszter>The second challenge isn’t logistical; it’s cultural. We’re operating in a world where culture now moves at a velocity that traditional quality simply wasn’t designed for. Trends, behaviours, and emotional codes don’t evolve annually or quarterly anymore; they shift weekly, sometimes overnight. TikTok alone can generate and retire entire identities in the span of a month. Contagious talks about ‘cultural flashpoints’ appearing and dissolving before most research is even commissioned.

WARC’s ‘Multiplier Effect’ shows that the brands that win today are those that participate in culture in real time, not after a six-week research cycle. And big thinkers in the industry repeatedly highlight that the way people express themselves, emotionally, visually, socially, is evolving faster than the traditional tools designed to study them. Classic focus groups and ethnographies are incredibly rich, but they’re inherently static snapshots. They capture a moment in time, while culture is now a moving target. By the time the transcripts are written up, the cultural meanings may already have morphed. That’s the gap strategists are struggling with our best tools to reveal deep truth, but the truth itself is now in constant motion.

Megh> Trends don’t start with hashtags, but what they start with is people. Social intelligence helps us catch those tiny shifts in conversation, the change in tone, the new slang, the cultural cues you only notice when you’re really paying attention (and are perpetually online). And with social intelligence we can observe those signals to see which ones have real momentum.

What I love is how social intelligence brings creativity and data together. Trend-spotting stops being a chase for virality and becomes more about understanding cultural relevance. It helps us see where the brand genuinely fits or even where it can lead. Culture moves faster than research cycles and trying to stay “on” 24/7 is impossible. Something’s in one day and out the next. That’s why social intelligence is so valuable: you can curate what works for your brand instead of jumping on every trend. Show up only where you know you can stand out.

Q> How can agencies and strategists, such as yourselves, future-proof their research without losing the essential human touch?

Eszter> Thanks to our Full Funnel Strategy Team’s collaborative innovation, we have designed a tool that combines human understanding with AI precision, in other words Synthetic Audience – we call it a Digital Twin.

Megh> It's a bespoke research model that recreates real audience conversations, giving us deep cultural and emotional insight even when live focus groups aren’t possible. It cuts research costs, speeds up iteration, and turns qualitative testing from weeks into hours. Continuously refreshed with real-time social signals and campaign data, it helps teams make smarter choices, more efficient campaigns, or even inputs towards product development decisions.

One of my favourite use cases for Digital Twins is that we can double check if our creative ideas spark interest with the chosen audience even before we bring the ideas to the clients.

Q> Eszter, you mentioned something to me earlier: ‘Creativity has a data problem, not a talent problem.’ Can you elaborate?

Eszter> A lot of people talk about a creativity problem in the industry, but what we have is a data problem. WARC’s ‘Health of Creativity’ makes it clear that creative effectiveness isn’t declining because talent has disappeared; it’s declining because the inputs have become thinner. When planners no longer have time for ethnography or focus groups, and creatives only receive dashboards, performance KPIs, or hyper-compressed briefs, their starting point is shallow. You cannot produce deep emotional work from thin emotional insight.

Creativity hasn’t lost its power; it’s lost its fuel. AI doesn’t create better creativity. Better input creates better creativity. What AI can do, when used well, is help us get to those thick, human, emotional inputs far faster than the old system allowed. It doesn’t replace the depth that planners and creatives need; it accelerates access to it. The quality of the work still depends on human judgment, cultural understanding, and strategic interpretation, AI just helps us reach the raw human truth more efficiently.