Arima’s Synthetic Society™ is the subject of a new Gartner analysis by Maria Marino. The piece looks at a question we often hear from marketing teams: what changes when audience research, planning, and measurement draw on the same view of the population?
Arima’s Synthetic Society™ starts with official census data for the U.S. and Canada. Arima’s proprietary SynC process then brings in trusted third-party sources, including information on purchasing, mobility, media habits, and attitudes. Those sources help build a statistically representative population of synthetic individuals without using any personally identifiable information.
For marketers, the point is what they can do with that foundation. A team can build an audience in Persona Builder, see how different media plans might reach it, test a message, examine where that audience lives and moves, and use marketing mix modeling to understand performance. Each question is different, but the population beneath the work stays consistent.
Gartner’s analysis also makes clear that the fit is not universal. The Synthetic Society currently covers the U.S. and Canada and is geared mainly toward consumer-facing businesses. Its range of tools takes more onboarding than a single-purpose product, so a team looking for only one narrow capability may not use the full platform.
For consumer brands and agencies juggling separate research, planning, and measurement tools, that breadth is the point. One shared population gives those teams a way to carry what they learn about an audience from the first question through to the final decision.
The Gartner analysis discusses Arima’s U.S. and Canadian populations. Arima now also has Synthetic Societies for the UK and Germany.
Gartner members can access the full report here: [https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/8025869]
Source: Gartner analysis of Arima’s Synthetic Society by Maria Marino. © 2026 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
