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.

Recently TouchPoints 2021 revealed:

• There was a 31% increase in the number of people doing DIY in Lockdown 2020 and a 12.3% increase in DIY in lockdown 2021 versus pre-lockdown 2020, showing that some motivation for home improvement remained in 2021 lockdown.
• While the number of people practising mindfulness/meditation increased by 14.1% in lockdown 2020, it fell by 7% in lockdown 2021, marking an 18.5% decrease between the two lockdown periods.
• 3% of the population have used an online dating site - searches for online dating remained at 3% for all three time periods: pre-lockdown 2020, lockdown 2020 and lockdown 2021.
• Meanwhile, property and job searches which both saw a dip in lockdown 2020, increased in lockdown 2021, both going from 6% in lockdown 2020 to 10% in 2021.

Find out more by watching the video of the TouchPoints 2021 Wave 1 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. For 2020 we have just launched a new integration with BARB to allow users to plan TV using TouchPoints behavioural targets in TechEdge.

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 2021 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 2020 IPA TouchPoints data, the IPA has published the third edition of the landmark report  Making sense – The commercial media landscape.

Making Sense - The commercial media landscape is designed to help planners and advertisers better understand the commercial media landscape and some of the changes which occurred as the country went into lockdown. Making Sense - The commercial media landscape is an annual publication and the 4th edition will be published in February 2022.

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.

Infographic Archive

With each annual release of TouchPoints data, new infographics are created. Discover insights from previous years in the TouchPoints infographic archive.

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.