The use of artificial intelligence in public relations is moving from simple text generation to advanced strategic planning. Laura Macdonald, Director of Growth at Hotwire agency, introduced the concept of synthetic focus groups during a workshop organized by PRNEWS. This technology allows PR teams to simulate audience reactions and test advertising messages before they are launched into the market.
The basis for creating these groups is existing data that companies often have available but do not fully utilize. To create a credible synthetic group, historical surveys, marketing personas, and contextual information about the target market are used. According to Macdonald, however, this is not just about inserting data into a chatbot. Specialized teams must map this data to the statistical distribution of the population to identify key persona clusters and their real representation in the population.
“We can use everything that AI itself knows about these people. For example, if you ask ChatGPT what it knows about you, it’s eerily accurate – from job type to personality traits. We then incorporate these insights into focus group models,” Macdonald explained.
She illustrated the practical application of the technology with a case study of a client in the transportation sector. The company wanted to position itself as a government-technology (GovTech) company to appeal to small investors, for whom these stocks have higher value. Thanks to AI agents in the Hotwire Spark tool, the agency found that investors, when interacting with language models, were not asking about the company's technical platform, but primarily about the risks of investing in the GovTech sector. These findings allowed the communication strategy to be adjusted to reflect actual market inquiries.
Synthetic focus groups serve PR professionals in three main areas. The first is the “gut check,” or verifying whether the topic is even interesting to the given audience. The second area is testing creative ideas, which allows ineffective concepts to be eliminated before presenting them to the client. The third benefit is guiding future research. Agencies can simulate responses in extensive surveys in advance and select only those questions that have the potential to generate a strong headline for the media.
The technology does not replace human judgment but serves as a strategic partner that increases the likelihood of campaign success in an environment where budgets for traditional large-scale market research are often limited.