Transforming Research Through Synthetic Data
The Future of Insights Is Here
At Ipsos, we're harnessing the power of synthetic data to revolutionise how research is conducted, analysed, and delivered. Simply put, synthetic data is artificially generated information that mirrors real-world data patterns seen in data collection without using actual participant responses – creating new possibilities for deeper, faster, and more comprehensive insights.
In today's rapidly evolving data landscape, organisations face increasing challenges with data accessibility, privacy regulations, and the need for more agile research methodologies. Synthetic data provides a powerful solution to these challenges by enabling research that was previously impossible, prohibitively expensive, or time-consuming. By leveraging advanced AI algorithms, we can now generate data that that is faithful to the original dataset from every measurable perspective and maintains the statistical properties and relationships of original datasets while creating new opportunities for innovation.
Our Synthetic Data Capabilities
Quantitative Data Augmentation
We enhance existing datasets to improve representativeness and reach, especially for rare or hard-to-reach audiences. In healthcare research, we've achieved 98.2% accuracy when synthesizing cancer treatment data, successfully capturing extremely niche patient groups that would be nearly impossible to reach through traditional methods.
This capability is particularly valuable when researching low-incidence populations where recruitment is challenging. By boosting your existing data with synthetic enhancements, we can help you uncover insights about smaller segments that would otherwise remain invisible in traditional research approaches.
By intelligently filling in missing information, we've reduced questionnaire length by up to 50% while maintaining over 90% accuracy. This means better participant experiences, higher completion rates, and more reliable insights.
The implications are significant: shorter surveys lead to higher completion rates, reduced respondent fatigue, and more authentic responses. Our clients have seen dramatic improvements in data quality and reduced data wastage, while simultaneously reducing field costs and research timelines. In one recent brand study, we successfully maintained data integrity while significantly enhancing the respondent experience.
We combine multiple datasets into unified, holistic views that reveal deeper patterns and connections. This breakthrough approach allows us to extract comprehensive insights from diverse information sources. Ipsos iris – the UK official online industry measurement solution - leverages fusion to bring together human centric behavioural data with site centric data, providing single source of truth for online advertising industry.
When your organization has various data streams – from surveys, CRM systems, transaction records, or social listening – synthetic data techniques can bridge these sources to create a more complete picture of your market and consumers. This eliminates data silos and enables multidimensional analysis that would otherwise require extensive manual integration.
Synthetic Participant Research
Our AI-powered virtual consumers represent specific audiences, bringing research findings to life and making insights more accessible and actionable for clients. These innovative tools help democratize research across organizations, maximizing ROI and impact.
Imagine being able to interact with and ask questions of virtual representations of your target segments at any time. These persona bots can respond to new product concepts, messaging strategies, or competitive scenarios in real-time, based on deep learning models trained on robust research data. This capability allows insights to travel further within your organization, enabling more stakeholders to directly engage with consumer perspectives.
The next frontier in market research – carefully crafted digital participants that can replicate human responses with remarkable accuracy, opening up unprecedented scale and speed for insight generation.
Synthetic panels represent the most sophisticated application of our synthetic data capabilities. These digital twins can provide responses that are statistically indistinguishable from real participants across a wide range of research scenarios. This advancement enables research at scales, speeds, and frequencies that were previously unimaginable, while still maintaining the highest standards of data quality and reliability.
Our Approach: Human Intelligence + Artificial Intelligence
Ipsos' synthetic data strategy embodies our "HI + AI" philosophy – the powerful combination of Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence. We recognise a fundamental truth: quality synthetic data cannot exist without quality human data. That's why our experts remain integral at every stage of creation, validation, and application.
The success of synthetic data hinges on the expertise that guides its development and use. Our researchers, methodologists, and data scientists work in concert to ensure that synthetic outputs maintain the nuance, complexity, and authenticity of human responses. This collaborative approach ensures that our synthetic data solutions are not just technologically advanced but also grounded in deep human understanding and research expertise.
Our framework is built on three pillars:
Ensuring synthetic outputs accurately reflect real-world behaviors and attitudes by rigorously validating against known benchmarks and real participant data
Being clear about methodologies, limitations, and applications so clients fully understand when and how synthetic data is being used
Maintaining the highest ethical standards in how we develop and deploy synthetic data, with careful attention to potential biases, privacy considerations, and appropriate use cases
Scientific Foundations
To ensure rigour and reliability, we've partnered with Stanford University to develop advanced digital twins methodologies. This collaboration provides us with privileged access to cutting-edge Generative AI research and helps us establish proprietary validation frameworks.
This strategic partnership combines Ipsos' decades of research expertise with Stanford's world-leading artificial intelligence capabilities.
Together, teams of AI researchers from Ipsos and Stanford are developing sophisticated validation protocols that can quantify the accuracy, reliability, and limitations of synthetic data across different research contexts and applications.
The collaboration includes:
- Development of proprietary testing methodologies to assess synthetic data quality
- Creation of validation benchmarks for different research applications
- Identification of appropriate use cases and limitations
- Establishment of ethical guidelines for synthetic data implementation
There's huge excitement and hype around synthetic data in the research industry right now. Over recent months, we've been learning – through rigorous testing and experimentation – what is and isn't possible when synthesising data from a wide range of survey datasets. That journey has helped us build some of the most advanced synthetic data generation capabilities in the industry today.
— Jon Puleston, Chief Methodologist, Ipsos IIS
The Future of Synthetic Data at Ipsos
Our investment in synthetic data capabilities represents one of our most significant strategic initiatives. As technologies advance and methodologies mature, we envision a future where synthetic data becomes an integral component of most research programs, working alongside traditional methods to create more comprehensive, agile, and powerful insights.
Future developments on our roadmap include:
- More sophisticated synthetic panel capabilities that can simulate longitudinal behavioural changes
- Integration of synthetic data with other advanced technologies like virtual reality and simulation testing
- Expanded cross-cultural synthetic capabilities that account for nuanced differences between markets
- Increasingly specialised synthetic applications for niche industries and research challenges
Ready to Transform Your Research?
Synthetic data represents a powerful new tool in the modern research toolkit – but like any tool, it must be applied thoughtfully, ethically, and with proper validation. At Ipsos, we're committed to being responsible pioneers in this revolutionary approach to insights generation.
Our team of experts can help you identify where synthetic data can add the most value to your research program – whether that's extending the reach of existing data, improving respondent experiences, democratising insights across your organisation, or enabling entirely new types of research that weren't previously possible.
Contact us today to explore how synthetic data can enhance your research programs while maintaining the scientific rigour and human understanding that drives meaningful business decisions. Together, we can unlock new dimensions of consumer understanding that drive competitive advantage in increasingly complex markets.
