Synthetic data company Arima has hired TS Kelly as chief of media research and analytics.

Kelly has been tasked with expanding the use and capabilities of Arima’s data science platform across North America, including work with associations and other trade bodies.

Arima specializes in synthetic data, building audience segments, conducting media measurement and finding business insights based on alogorithmically generated data, instead of personally identifiable information or trackers.

Though Kelly’s remit covers all of North America, he is based in New York, something Chris Williams, CMO at Arima, says will help the company extend into the U.S. “at a time where keeping abreast of the global picture is critical.”

Kelly spent the last three years at Dentsu, most recently as EVP of media effectiveness in New York.
The new hire comes after Arima signed a deal to work with Ipsos on integrating synthetic data into the research company’s Canadian Financial Monitor, a syndicated study designed to monitor the banking habits, product holdings, financial health, financial literacy and attitudes of Canadians. The ongoing database, which has existed for 25 years, is based on a survey of 18,000 individuals that is updated monthly. Incorporating synthetic data offers privacy protection for all of this personal information.

Ray Kong, client partner at Ipsos, sees the data enriching segment descriptions, geospatial and location data, and marketing mix modeling for media planning. He says the data also informs new product decisions such as new credit cards or loyalty programs. “A client might say we need to understand over the last three years whether the mix of chequing account balances and the number of different financial institutions that Canadians where they have their chequing accounts has changed. That’s really important information for decision making processes.”

Kong adds that he has been stressing to people that it’s still early days for integrating synthetic data into Ipsos products, but that this is the first of its kind in North America. “Theoretically, this has been possible for years, but no one has actually done it. We haven’t even imagined all the uses for this for this data, this dataset. That’s exciting.”

With files from Patti Sumerfield.