Khalil A. Cassimally is an audience consultant and coach who helps organisations align teams around change, user needs and AI.
Synthetic audiences promise fast, cheap reader feedback, but the claims made for them are easy to misread. Drawing on recent research and his own practice, he shares a practical four-step way to use synthetic audiences to:
- Recognise where synthetic feedback stops being trustworthy
- Run a panel grounded in material your newsroom already has
- Test language, narrow options and surface objections before committing
> Audience consultant Khalil Cassimally's rule is to use synthetic audiences to narrow, never to decide. They rank options and surface objections, but cannot tell you magnitudes like willingness to pay > Start with the decision you need to make, not the question you want to ask. Most synthetic research fails by producing interesting material nobody was ever going to act on > Ground the panel in words real readers actually wrote. Old interview transcripts, cancellation reasons, unread survey comments. The test is whether you can name the humans inside the system > Most teams only ever count responses. The better question is where your draft conflicts with what you have documented about a reader, which is analysis rather than impersonation > Tell it to answer as a reader rather than an analyst, and that indifference is valid. Then validate whatever survives with real people, which is where the saving comes from
Audience research in most newsrooms comes in two states. Either we talk to real people or we don’t do it at all. In my experience, the second is far more common than the first.
And where research does happen, rather than being systematic, it tends to happen once in a while. Worse still, its insights usually go into a report or a slide deck, which just sits in a shared drive.
What we lose by not doing research
Organisations that research their audiences well outperform the ones that don’t. The gap is not small. A study compared companies with mature research practices against those with weak ones across a dozen business outcomes. On revenue, 47% of high-maturity organisations reported a positive impact against 11% of low-maturity ones. On customer retention, 58% against 24%. Averaged across every outcome measured, the research-mature organisations came out 2.3 times ahead.
None of that is unique to the media but the mechanism is familiar to anyone who has been a part of a redesign that’s gone badly. Knowing what readers actually think changes what gets built. Not knowing means guessing, and guesses compound.
The questions most research doesn’t tackle
