Early in my marketing career, at General Mills, we used to hold focus groups in a Minneapolis suburb called Eden Prairie.
I once overheard a couple of our agency partners jokingly refer to this focus group ritual as going to see the “Oracles of Eden Prairie.” Whether new products, campaign strategy, or ad creative, the Oracles of Eden Prairie had major sway.
Focus groups (and all the rest of our market research tools) were imperfect, mysterious, expensive, and seemingly took forever, but they were the best we had at the time.
Market research is one of the areas of marketing most ripe for change, and where we’re seeing some of the most exciting potential impact from new technology, including AI.
Sorin Patilinet, Senior Director at Mars, describes some of the common frustrations with market research:
“In today’s world, you don’t have the time or the luxury to measure creative and to make decisions in three months, everyone screams that you need decisions today.”
Sorin led a team at Mars that created an analytic tool called ACE (Agile Creative Expertise) that measures audience’s emotional reaction and attention to ads to predict effectiveness in driving sales.
Evidenza, founded by Peter Weinberg, Jon Lombardo, and Brian Watroba, is taking market research even further. They’re pioneering the use of synthetic data to create AI copies of customers. Their platform creates digital personas that marketers can interview about just about any burning question in real-time.
Adweek reported that Toni Clayon-Hine, CMO of EY, ran a fascinating test of Evidenza versus traditional market research. They fielded their annual brand survey — asking executives at large companies to share investment plans and thoughts on EY — both ways.
What typically stretched six to eight weeks took Evidenza a day or two, with the same results. Toni said, “It was astounding that the matches were so similar. I mean, it was 95% correlation.”
Ad agencies like Pereira O’Dell, Supernatural, and Media.Monks have also started to experiment with AI-generated focus groups.
This is a new age for the Oracles of Eden Prairie.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
