August 7, 2026 | In the News

Wakefield Research’s Nathan Richter Cautions Against Over-Reliance on Synthetic Audiences in Digiday

Nathan Richter, Senior Partner at Wakefield Research, is one of the expert voices in a new Digiday article on a question the marketing research world is still arguing about: how much weight synthetic, AI-generated audiences should really be given.

The piece centers on Ideally, a New Zealand-based research firm building tools to bring consumer insight into the creative process earlier than usual. Digiday reports that Omnicom Oceania is already a client, running the platform across more than 60 tests and projects spanning 23 brand categories, at roughly a tenth of what a traditional research engagement would cost.

Richter’s take added some ballast to that momentum. “Synthetic research can inform early stages of the creative process, but should not be used to drive creative decisions,” he told Digiday.

His reasoning: AI-generated audiences can mimic the shape of human response, but they can’t reproduce the messiness of real people’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions as those shift and contradict themselves in the moment. Lean on synthetic data alone, he cautioned, and research risks just echoing patterns already baked into the data it was trained on, rather than turning up the kind of original insight that actually moves a campaign forward.

It’s a fair check on the industry’s current pace. Brands and agencies are under real pressure to compress research timelines and cut costs with AI tools, and Richter’s comments read less like resistance to that shift and more like a reminder of where the guardrails belong. That’s the kind of methodology-first perspective that has kept Wakefield Research a trusted name where data, AI, and marketing decisions meet.

Synthetic tools may be speeding up the front end of research. The discipline behind sound, human-grounded insight is still what makes that research worth trusting.