Human-calibrated digital twins are used in many industries. But soon, they may be enabling brands to quantify and optimise resonance – and turn that into real-time activation.
We dive into the potential opportunities of digital twins in the advertising world with Parallel UK Managing Director, Ben Dimond…
1. Tell us about your adtech background.
My career in media started back in 2008 with Manning Gottlieb OMD.
I worked a lot with mobile, then eventually spent eight years at Playground xyz, which is where I first worked with Parallel founder Rob Hall.
Playground xyz was an attention-based advertising platform, acquired by GumGum in 2021.
Prior to joining Parallel, I was with Lumen Research, which specialises in attention measurement, and I’m thrilled now to be heading up UK operations for Parallel.
2. Why was Parallel created, and what problem does it seek to solve?
Parallel introduces the concept of Customer Suitability to advertising. It’s a genuinely new approach to media buying that aims to bring the voice of the customer into every advertising impression.
It uses human-calibrated digital twins to simulate and score the resonance between a customer, an ad and the content it runs against, enabling brands to quantify and optimise resonance – and then turns that into real-time activation.
There are lots of solutions out there that handle brand safety and brand suitability, and that’s how it should be, but there’s nothing that tackles what Parallel tackles: ensuring that the ad is right for the customer viewing it.
We see Customer Suitability as the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
3. Who else is on board?
It’s a bit of a reformation of the Playground xyz band.
Parallel was founded by Rob Hall, who co-founded Playground, which shaped how a whole industry thinks about attention in digital media.
Playground Co-founders Scot Liddell and Jonathan Mullins are our COO and CTO respectively, and Billy Gittins, another Playground and GumGum veteran, is our Senior Sales Lead, heading up the commercial operation.
4. How does it work? Tell me about digital twins.
Digital twins are a very established technology that is used in manufacturing, healthcare, engineering and other industries to create virtual, dynamic replicas of physical assets, processes or environments to prototype products and model scenarios.
Parallel is the world’s first digital-twin activation platform. It scores how a customer will respond to a creative in the content it runs against – so brands and agencies can find the combinations that resonate and activate the impressions that land.
We have built a nationally-representative cohort of digital twins – 1,000 in the UK, and 1,000 in Australia. Each digital twin is a simulated version of a consumer, trained on real data.
These digital twins are configured specifically for advertising, and calibrated via real human behaviours, enriched with personalities, interests and beliefs.
In fact, our research tells us that our digital twins are 80.4% accurate against real human responses. With these digital twins at our disposal, we can test multiple creatives among multiple content items to find the best fit between the ad and the people seeing it.
5. How do you create an accurate digital twin, and how scalable is the tech? What information do you need from your clients to create them?
Digital twins are built from multiple independent, nationally representative datasets, including census and behavioural panels; values surveys and platform-usage data, all cross-validated.
This gives us accurate demographics, coherent psychographics, and correlated behaviours, validated against held-out benchmarks. Clients can also add their own audience data into the mix.
6. How does Parallel activate into programmatic? Is it in real time or is this more about testing creative pre-launch?
Parallel runs constant simulations to gauge the resonance between the customer, creative and content. This happens before the campaign goes live but then throughout the campaign as new content is released.
7. You talk about “resonance”. How do you define it and why should advertisers care?
Resonance is really relevance, supercharged. It’s the fit between a customer, an ad and the content they’re viewing.
Other than Parallel, no one is asking the customer if an ad will resonate when it runs alongside a specific piece of content.
Context isn’t always king – the underlying customer need state is actually the key thing. Imagine a running shoe ad creative promoting a gritty 6am workout.
Scenario A: it airs during Premier League highlights. It’s sports content, but the viewer is lying on the couch in relax mode. The creative doesn’t resonate.
Scenario B: It airs during a video about improving football drills. The viewer is in a self-improvement frame of mind. The message resonates perfectly.
Both are football content, but only one captures the right need state. When we stop chasing just semantic-level context matches, we open the door to finding audiences in the appropriate need state for the ad to resonate.
And what’s more, this can (and does) happen in unexpected places – that ‘self-improvement’ mode from above may also be present when watching productivity-style content. And that running shoe advertiser would usually never think that was a match.
The added benefit for the brand is that, in some cases, the semantic, contextual-matched content is where all their competitors are trying to buy, and is therefore expensive.
By looking for the need state, the brand can find great (put perhaps less obvious and less expensive) content where their creative will resonate.
When an ad fits the content around it, people respond better. And this isn’t just something we believe in: according to IAS, receptiveness to an ad increases by 1.5x when the ad is sentiment-aligned.
8. Do you see this tech as replacing or complementing existing approaches?
The only approach that comes close to what Parallel does is campaign pre-testing, but that is time-consuming and difficult to perform at scale, and of course it’s not real-time.
We envisage Customer Suitability becoming an integral part of campaign planning and execution within the next couple of years.
9. Lots of companies talk about their ability to reach the right customer at the right time with the right message. If they can do this, why do they need Parallel?
The industry is always advancing, and through smart innovation, we improve our practices.
Parallel’s technology helps brands bring the customer’s voice into media decisioning, something that does not exist today.
If a brand wants to put their ad in the right place at the right time, having the customer’s voice in that decisioning is crucial.