FleishmanHillard Rolls Out a Virtual Audience Platform That Brings Real People in the Room

What if you could just turn to your audience and ask what they think or if they have other ideas—right when you need their input? 💡💡💡

Today, we’re proud to launch Sage, our virtual audience development platform and team of expert audience developers. Over the past year, we’ve been developing and testing virtual audiences with clients across consumer, corporate and B2B sectors, working “with” audiences to develop strategies, campaigns and content for clients across healthcare, consumer, and corporate communications.

What makes Sage Virtual Audiences different?

Far too often, once campaign research is complete, it gets filed away to gather dust. This service changes that. It’s a living, evolving model of audiences that keeps learning over time.

Sage Virtual Audiences are built through a powerful combination of:

Omni-based data from Omnicom’s industry-leading audience insights platform.

The OPRG data stack.

FleishmanHillard’s audience profiling expertise.

And it doesn’t stop at demographics or dashboards. We pull together multiple information streams—how audiences behave online, what they’re saying, expert insights, social trends, and influencer content—to create virtual audiences that feel genuinely real.

We also focus on capturing the authentic “voice” of the audience, using transcripts, posts, and other audience content as data sources. It doesn’t just give you synthetic data; it helps you understand how your messages land with real people, using their actual language and thought patterns.

And it does so with a high level of accuracy.

Virtual audiences, real impact

Sage Virtual Audiences are continuously updated using proven research methodologies to ensure specific confidence levels and insights based on the most recent news, points of view, and behavioral changes. Primary research can be added quarterly to ensure virtual responses are the equivalent of real-world responses, for clients needing extra rigor.

In all cases, the virtual audiences provide the equivalent of a fresh survey for every topic, but at a fraction of the cost.

Choose the Sage that fits

Sage Virtual Audiences come in different flavors depending on what you need. Tailored formats include:

✅ **Sage Test**: Test strategy, ideas and messages before they go live

✅ **Sage Focus**: Focus groups that mimic real conversations

✅ **Sage Survey**: Develop personas and create synthetic survey result data

✅ **Sage Brainstorm**: Brainstorm with AI in both voice and text modes

✅ **Sage Measure**: Scoring results and measuring message pull-through

✅ **Sage Crisis**: Assess risk and get feedback in real-time during crises

✅ **Sage Personas**: Enrich audience segmentation insights and playbooks

We can model a wide range of audiences, too. Replications include audiences for:

Consumers

Business folks

Corporate stakeholders

Cultural groups

Political and policy audience

Want to learn more about virtual audiences and how they might help your next project? Drop us a line at [email protected].