Faraday’s interns built an even smarter Persona pipeline, here's how it works

This spring, a team of interns from Middlebury College joined Faraday with a plan: take Faraday’s powerful Persona data and make it even easier for marketers to leverage. And armed with skills in statistics, math, and understanding of client marketing challenges, they took on one of the most common hurdles our clients face—how to identify insights that drive results.

Take a look at the interview:

The problem: too much data, not enough insight

Faraday’s Identity Graph provides over 1,500 consumer traits, and our Persona feature organizes audiences into distinctive cohorts (like "Middle-aged Mom Moira"). But marketers often need help identifying which traits matter for each Persona and how to act on them.

Faraday already offers several ways to tackle this challenge, from forward-deployed data scientists to model explainability tools built into the platform. It’s 2025 and our interns saw an opportunity to create a new, agentic workflow to automate the process: a tool that could not only automatically surface the most distinctive traits of each Persona, but also translate those traits into actionable messaging and product recommendations, without manual intervention.

The solution: an automated pipeline

The interns designed a pipeline that pulls Persona data from the Faraday API, identifies distinctive traits, and feeds them into Perplexity AI. From there, Perplexity generates tailored messaging suggestions, product recommendations, and even market sizing insights—all mapped back to the Persona’s unique profile.

The final output? A clean, shareable marketing report that makes complex trait data immediately usable. No spreadsheets. No guesswork. No manual data sifting.

Download sample report #1.

How it works

To measure how distinct each trait is across Personas, the team used two core metrics:

• Energy Distance for continuous variables like income or age
• Total Variation Distance for categorical traits like gender or household type

These tests compare distributions across every Persona pair, flagging the trait where a Persona stands out most. The process is statistically grounded, with hypothesis testing and p-values to ensure real, meaningful differences are surfaced.

Once the key traits are identified, they’re passed into Perplexity AI along with client-specific context (like a brand website). The result? A few paragraphs of tailored content that includes:

• A narrative summary of the Persona
• Marketing language suggestions
• Recommended products
• Market size estimations

All compiled into a client-ready report with citations.

Download sample report #2.

Turning Personas into action

The real win here isn’t just technical—it’s strategic. Marketers don’t want a firehose of 1,500 traits washing over them at once, they want to know:

• What makes this Persona unique?
• How should we talk to them?
• What should we sell?

This project answers those questions automatically—bridging the gap between complex analytics and real-world execution.

For instance

Imagine you’re a DTC skincare brand, exploring expansion into a more mature market segment. You’re already using Faraday to generate Personas, and one of them—“Self-Care Susan”—represents health-conscious women in their 60s who regularly purchase wellness products online. With this new pipeline, your team can instantly uncover what makes Susan unique (say, high engagement with plant-based ingredients and interest in loyalty programs), along with AI-generated messaging tailored to her values and product suggestions rooted in actual purchase behavior.

Suddenly, instead of wading through hundreds of traits or manually brainstorming campaign copy, your marketing team is armed with a ready-to-use report: what to say, what to sell, and why it’ll resonate.

It’s a leap from data to decision—saving time, improving targeting, and increasing campaign impact.

Special thanks

Big thanks to our incredible interns, Kayley, Zach, and Xander—as well as Middlebury College—for their fantastic work. This is only the beginning, but it's already showing what happens when you combine statistical rigor with real-world marketing needs.

Time to get started

Want to learn more or hear how these powerful new Persona pipelines could benefit your company? Reach out!