News UK creates synthetic audiences from The Times data

Per Digiday, News UK is turning The Times' first-party data into a synthetic audience planning tool called "Times ExplorAItion" that advertisers can use to plan and test campaigns. Digiday reports the tool combines stripped-back subscriber behaviour, reader panels, engagement statistics and third-party PAMCo industry data, and feeds those inputs into the Electric Twin synthetic-audience platform. Digiday reports no personally identifiable information will be used. Digiday also reports the publisher is currently offering the tool as a value-add for branded content deals rather than charging an extra fee.

Per Digiday, advertisers can use the generated synthetic audiences to run surveys and pressure-test propositions, messaging and formats within seconds. Digiday reports the system, powered by Electric Twin, has been used for months across The Times and The Sunday Times to inform subscription strategy, content decisions and product development. Digiday reports The Times has 659,000 digital subscribers, up 7% in the past year, per the publisher. The article includes a direct quote from Caroline Tredget, commercial director, The Times and The Sunday Times: "High-net-worth individuals and business decision makers tend to be really time poor," said Caroline Tredget.

Editorial analysis: Industry context: Publishers and ad tech vendors have been experimenting with privacy-preserving audience techniques as third-party cookies and open-web signals decline. Companies in comparable positions often combine first-party engagement signals with synthetic or probabilistic modelling to enable rapid qualitative testing and to present audience reach to advertisers while reducing direct use of identifiable records. The approach cited by Digiday trades off direct responder-level measurement for fast, repeatable scenario testing and advertiser-facing planning outputs.

For practitioners: What to watch: Observers following the sector will watch whether publishers migrate this capability from a value-add into a priced product, and whether advertisers and measurement partners accept synthetic cohorts as a reliable planning input. Other indicators include independent audits of synthetic fidelity, integration with campaign measurement platforms, and any regulatory or ad-industry guidance on provenance and acceptable use of synthetic audience outputs. For data teams, the practical questions will be tooling for dataset curation, bias assessment of synthetic cohorts, and measurement backstops to connect synthetic-driven planning to real-world campaign performance.