TouchPoints

TouchPoints is an essential tool for everyone in the advertising industry. We already have over 70 subscribers including the top ten media agencies and media owners covering all areas of the business. 

By highlighting the habits and media moments of multiple target markets, TouchPoints helps us understand the context of media consumption throughout the day or across a week. These insights can help you with your communication planning and buying.

It creates a 360-degree view of people’s daily lives and all the information you need to successfully implement cross-media channel planning.

Here's a great introduction to TouchPoints video to show you how it all works.

TouchPoints 2024 reveals significant impacts of the cost of living crisis:

• Almost half of consumers (45.9%) of consumers are actively looking for money-off vouchers. This is a 10% percentage increase year-on-year and almost 45% higher than in pre-lockdown 2020.
• Over a third of consumers (34.7%) often check the comparative online price of a product they are looking at in-store. This is up 6% year-on-year and again considerably higher than in pre-lockdown 2020 when it stood at 28.3%.
• Over half of consumers (55%) state that they will gladly switch brands to make use of a coupon. This is up from 52.9% year-on-year, and up 18% from pre-lockdown 2020.
• Consumers are continuing to use a range of supermarkets and shops for their weekly grocery shopping. This figure stands at 43.1% of consumers, up marginally from last year at 42.7% and up considerably again from pre-lockdown 2020 where it stood at 37.5%.
• The percentage of GB consumers going to the pub/bar each week has also reduced, by 6% year-on-year, from 33.7% to 31.7%. In pre-lockdown 2020 this figure was higher still at 34.2%.
• Consumers’ visits to restaurants have also dropped this year. Currently, 25% of British consumers have visited a restaurant in the past week, which is down 14% year-on-year when it stood at 29% of consumers. In pre-lockdown 2020 this figure was 30.6%.

These are just some of the arresting findings from the 2024 IPA TouchPoints data which, in revealing the habits of British consumers’ daily lives and how their media usage fits into this, evidences the paralyzing impact the cost-of-living crisis is having on consumers’ lives in the short and longer-term. The nationally representative survey was carried out on over 6,000 GB adults aged 15+, between September–December 2023 and January–April 2024.

Find out more by watching the video of the TouchPoints 2024 Launch.

How TouchPoints works

 TouchPoints provides two distinct databases:

1. TouchPoints Daily Life offers a detailed view of ‘a week in the life’ of consumer behaviour.
2. The TouchPoints Channel Planner is the only industry-available, cross-media channel planner. It has been created by integrating the industry media currencies onto TouchPoints Daily Life, including BARB, FAME, JICREG, JICMAIL, PAMCo, RAJAR, Route, and UKOM. For product and brand information we also integrate TGI and YouGov.

TouchPoints has also been designed to facilitate the integration of clients’ own datasets or proprietary tools.

The TouchPoints data can be analysed within software bureaux systems such as Telmar, via MediaTel Connected, on the DayLite dashboard and also in raw Respondent Level Data format via Google BigQuery.

How we collect TouchPoints data

TouchPoints Daily Life is based on a representative sample of over 6,000 adults aged 15+, living in Great Britain.

Each respondent is asked to:

• Keep a diary via their mobile phone, detailing their activities every half an hour over seven days
• Complete an online questionnaire about how they spend their daily lives covering attitudes, shopping and media behaviour

View the most recent 2024 TouchPoints Questionnaire and TouchPoints Diary.

TouchPoints Channel Planner

The TouchPoints Daily Life data set is expanded onto the BARB Establishment Survey. This creates an average of nine clones for every TouchPoints Daily Life respondent giving us an operational sample size of approximately 50,000.

This expansion allows all industry media currency respondents to be used in the integration process and this technique substantially strengthens the match of media research currencies to TouchPoints. These integrations create the database which delivers cross-media channel planning.

Where we do not currently have industry currencies (e.g. VoD) we model the data from our own diary and self-completion questionnaires.

Confused about the Channel Planner? Here's a great Channel Planner explainer video to show you how it all works.

TouchPoints: What's new

In addition to the launch of the 2024 IPA TouchPoints data, the IPA has published the sixth edition of the landmark report Making Sense – The commercial media landscape.

Making Sense - The commercial media landscape uses data from IPA TouchPoints 2024 (September–December 2023 and January–April 2024) to help planners and advertisers better understand how the commercial media landscape has evolved, and how this has influenced consumer behaviour and some of the changes which occurred as the country went into lockdown, and what is happening post-COVID. Making Sense - The commercial media landscape is an annual publication and the 7th edition will be published in September 2025.

Talking TouchPoints marks the 15th anniversary of the IPA TouchPoints study which provides a 360-degree understanding of people’s daily lives, their media usage and its context, enabling effective cross-media channel planning. Highlights, case studies and more have been captured in a new publication, Talking TouchPoints, that looks back at 15 years of the ground-breaking tool.

Useful TouchPoints Tools

To help you understand how you can benefit from TouchPoints data try these easy-to-use tools:

• DayLite - A quick and easy way to find out the daily media habits of a range of target markets along with a variety of qualitative data from TouchPoints on how people coped during the lockdown.
• ARC by TouchPoints is a quick ready reckoner to provide cover curves for each medium showing cover build vs GRPs. This tool will help you to estimate coverage based on different audiences, different GRP weights and different media.
• TouchPoints e-learning - Training and online module for newcomers.

How brands have used TouchPoints 

• TouchPoints helped identify key drinking moments for Fullers.
• TouchPoints identified opportunities in the non-linear audio space for BBC.
• TouchPoints helped inform the strategic approach with behavioural insight for MEC Public Health.

Access further examples in Talking Touchpoints: Celebrating 15 Years of TouchPoints, TouchPoints Works and TouchPoints Works 2 publications.