Sample Popcast At Home output — synthetic.
POPCAST
Popcast
Popcast is Motionworks' population and household intelligence family. It answers two foundational questions: where does an audience live, and where do they spend time?
Popcast™ At Home summarizes any user-defined population segment by primary residence — at the US Census Block Group level, across postal codes, metropolitan areas, and states. Each record reports persons, households, and group-quarters counts for the matching cohort. Coverage extends across the United States, Canada, and Australia, with annual vintages available from 2021 forward.
Popcast™ Anytime flips the lens: instead of asking where a cohort lives, it estimates how many people are present in any Census Block Group at any hour of the day, for any day type, going back to January 2019. That includes non-residents — commuters, shoppers, visitors. Data are released monthly within 15 days of the close of each month.
Underlying both panels is the Popcast™ Digital Population — a synthetic, privacy-safe representation of the US population anchored to Census-based control totals and enriched with Claritas demographic and PRIZM segment data. Digital Population is the denominator that makes cohort sizing consistent and comparable across time and geography.
- 800+ Population cohorts
- Block group Resolution
- At Home + Anytime Two panels
Products
Popcast™ Digital Pop United States Motionworks Popcast™ Digital Pop is a virtual representation of the population. View → Popcast™ at Home Motionworks Popcast™ at Home summarizes any user defined population segment for any geography. View → Popcast™ Anytime Motionworks Popcast™ Anytime measures the total number of persons present in any US Census Block Group at any hour of the day. View →
Download a sample
Synthetic sample outputs to evaluate shape and structure. Each pair includes a tear sheet PDF and a data file.
Sample Basecast output — synthetic.
Who uses Popcast
- Media planners and agencies use Popcast At Home to size and locate custom audience cohorts — building reach-and-frequency models before a buy and validating post-campaign.
- Out-of-home operators use Popcast Anytime to understand who is physically present in a geography at a given hour, going beyond home-area attribution to capture the full ambient audience.
- Retailers and site selectors use At Home data to evaluate trade area demographics and index prospective locations against target cohort concentrations.
- Research teams and data scientists use Digital Population as a privacy-safe population base for modeling, validation studies, and derived product development.
- Tourism authorities and convention bureaus use Anytime occupancy data to characterize visitor populations in destination markets across day types and seasons.
Data dimensions at a glance
| Dimension | Coverage |
|---|---|
| Geographic coverage | United States, Canada (At Home, Digital Pop); United States (Anytime) |
| Geographic resolution | Census Block Group (primary); Postal Code, Metro Area, State available |
| Temporal coverage | At Home: 2021–present (annual); Anytime: January 2019–present (monthly) |
| Update cadence | At Home: released within 14 days of segment definition; Anytime: monthly, released on the 15th |
| Latency | At Home: 14 days; Anytime: within 15 days of close of month |
| Delivery | Snowflake secure view; flat-file export (csv.gz) available |
Methodology summary
Popcast At Home and Digital Population are built on Claritas Pop Facts control totals — calibrated annually to US Census Bureau ACS estimates — combined with Motionworks' synthetic population methodology. The Digital Population is a statistically representative replica of the real population: no individual is identifiable within it, and records are suppressed and aggregated to protect privacy. Popcast Anytime is derived from a quality-filtered monthly panel of opted-in mobile devices, reweighted to full population scale using a device multiplier calibrated against the Digital Population.
Full methodology → Methods: Population Intelligence
Validation
Annual Digital Population vintages carry formal validation reports comparing synthetic totals to ACS benchmarks. Validation reports are available for US vintages 2021–2026 and Canadian vintages 2021–2022 within the Digital Population pages.
Jobs this family powers
- Audience Planning — Define a custom cohort using any combination of demographic, consumer, or PRIZM attributes. Popcast At Home shows where that cohort lives; Popcast Anytime shows where they spend time throughout the week. Together they form the starting point for media reach, allocation, and attribution workflows.
- Place Analysis — Combine Popcast At Home trade-area data with Placecast visitation profiles to characterize which cohorts are visiting specific places and where those visitors come from.