According to a new Ipsos Global Influentials (IGI) report, top earners and company leaders spend a significant portion of their day consuming media, and they may be completing multiple tasks at the same time.
The survey seeks to provide insights into the people who are influencing and shaping the future of consumption and culture around the world. The research covers the top 20% of those with wealth, power and influence. It tracks how they consume various product categories, covering over 2,000 brands across 49 categories. It does exclude media brands but asks company leaders about 169 business-to-business brands. Fieldwork for IGI is continuous, conducted year-round.
Findings show that they spend 82 minutes visiting websites on a mobile device each day, 79 minutes with social media, 79 minutes visiting websites on a computer, 53 watching video on a non-TV set, 59 minutes streaming audio or radio, and 31 listening to podcasts.
TV remains their top source for news, sports (28%) and entertainment (22%) while websites are the main source for business and finance (22%) and travel (28%). Social media is where they go to stay up-to-date with lifestyle and fashion (24%).
Global influentials are frequent travellers with 83% saying they enjoy going to new destinations, 74% travelling by air in the past year, and 68% stating they’d rather spend money on a fantastic trip than an expensive car. They are luxury travellers spend an average of USD $18,742 on travel each year. When travelling, 76% say comfort and services are worth paying for, 44% used an airline lounge in the past year, and 39% typically stay at four and five-star hotels.
It was found that on average company leaders have excess wealth totalling almost twice the salary of influentials. They also have higher value in personal investments and assets. This breaks down to an average personal income of USD $201,287 and USD $1,084,590 in liquid assets for company leaders versus USD $111,665 and USD $897,392 on average for Influentials.
The IGI reports that the influentials cohort has a combined annual household income of USD $22.9 trillion, exceeding the GDP of China, the world’s second largest economy according to the World Bank.
Company leaders are very involved in procurement for their companies, USD $3.35 million on average over the course of their work. They say their current business challenges include cyber security (27%), inflation (25%), attracting and retaining top talent (22%) and quickly changing technological advances (20%). Among their other challenges, they cite climate change and sustainability, government policy and regulation, price of fuel/energy/raw materials, and globalization. In five years, they expect that innovation and keeping up with tech advances will be the top challenge (26%) followed by security/cyber security (24%) and volatile markets/economic uncertainty (22%).
For the IGI, 90,000 individuals were surveyed across APAC, Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Africa. IGI will extend its reach to include Latin America by the second half of 2025. Among the 90,000 individuals surveyed, 16,000 are company leaders.
