Pereira O’Dell is holding focus groups with AI-generated consumers

Bernard is a 40-year-old libertarian, does accounting for a tech company and likes to listen to Pearl Jam while lifting weights. He also doesn’t exist. Bernard is one of a handful of artificial personas created by Pereira O’Dell’s new Insights Machine, a platform built for simulating conversation with consumers. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, the bots can be trained on swaths of data, including proprietary information, to more accurately resemble a brand’s target audience. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Take Olivia, a fake 22-year-old student at Florida State University. She loves Taylor Swift and TikTok, making her an ideal resource for, say, a Gen Z-focused brand interested in bringing more pop culture into its marketing. Importantly, the bots are not meant to be used for serious data analysis; rather, they are intended to help marketers stumble upon information that they may not otherwise consider when making predictions on consumer behavior. “The experience of talking to the data is the result,” said P.J. Pereira, co-founder and creative chairman of Pereira O’Dell. Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards Final deadline approaching for annual program Enter here For example, when Ad Age asked if she would enter a brand sweepstakes for a weeklong trip to Cancun starting Dec. 9, Olivia declined, citing final exams that are apparently scheduled during that time. Bernard, on the other hand, declined a promotion for dog food because his busy schedule prevents him from owning any pets. A key feature of Insights Machine is the ability for Pereira O’Dell and its clients to converse with multiple personas at once—essentially, it’s an AI-generated focus group. The agency has created four personas for each of its brand clients, for a total of over 30 synthetic consumers. A marketer can prompt a single question, and it will be answered in rapid succession by the queried bots. Moreover, the marketer does not have to worry about upsetting the respondents by prying too deeply (they don’t have feelings) nor exhausting them by asking too many questions (they don’t get tired). Simulating conversations with consumers is the latest use case that AI bots offer the ad industry. The rise of ChatGPT has renewed interest in AI assistants, which have cropped up in numerous social media apps and enterprise tools. Meta is testing the ability for brands to create their own bots, tailored to particular brand identities, to be used in WhatsApp and Messenger. More: ChatGPT’s success as a brand is hardly artificial As with any of these chatbots, however, those of Insights Machine have their foibles. Neither Olivia nor Bernard seemed aware that they were synthetic people, and when the fact of their artificiality was brought to their attention, they vehemently denied it, claiming they were real individuals with real lives. The pattern places Insights Machine within an ongoing and vigorous debate over the transparency of AI systems. ChatGPT, for one, readily tells users that it is a computer program. ‹ › × (Click image to enlarge) Credit: Pereira O'Dell (An earlier version of Insights Machine was called “Persona AI.”) Another issue could arise if a brand trains the bots on sensitive and detailed consumer data, enabling the possibility for synthetic personas that are too similar to real people. Having such technology would be quite useful to marketers, but the ethical misgivings are significant, especially if consumers are unaware that their data is being used for such purposes. “We haven’t considered that that would be an issue,” said Todd Thiessen, managing partner at Plan.Net Americas, a sister company of Pereira O’Dell's that co-developed the Insights Machine platform. AI marketing blog How brands are using ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and other tools Read more here

Pereira O’Dell is holding focus groups with AI-generated consumers

Featured Stories