The IPA’s TouchPoints database was created to meet the needs of the communications industry. It offers agencies, media owners and advertisers unique insights into the daily life and media usage of people in Great Britain.
How TouchPoints can help your business
TouchPoints is an essential tool for everyone in the advertising industry. We already have nearly 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 revealed:
- British adults are consuming 8 hours and 11 minutes of all media (television, radio, social networking/messaging, internet, cinema and more) per day.
- The most popular time for shopping/purchasing is between 11.30 and midday on Saturday.
- Netflix is watched by 29% of adults and 54% of 15–34 year olds, each week.
- The most popular time for feeling positive is 12.00 t0 12.30 on Friday.
- 28% of adults listen to online streaming services like Spotify or Apply Music, each week rising to 51% for 15 – 34s.
- 46% of us use the car to get to work each day, 3% of us use a bicycle.
How TouchPoints works
TouchPoints provides three distinct databases:
- TouchPoints Daily Life offers a detailed view of ‘a week in the life’ of consumer behaviour.
- Passive Data is passively collected data, which records respondents’ use of their own mobile phones and tablets giving a deeper insight into how people use their mobile devices.
- 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.
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
- Download an app onto their mobile phone and tablet which passively measures their mobile use over a period of a week.
View the most recent TouchPoints Questionnaire
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 video to show you how it all works.
TouchPoints: What's New
To help you interpret the data that is collected we've created the What's New infographic series. These infographics look at the new developments in the questionnaire and eDiary, including key insights from brand new questions.
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:
- TouchPoints e-learning - Training and online module for newcomers
- DayLite - A quick and easy way to find out the daily media habits of a range of target markets.
- Navigator - A dashboard offering a visual deep-dive into the breadth and depth of the questions covered in TouchPoints. (also open to non-subscribers)
- Time Tracker - Find out what happened in the hour before and after people were exposed to specific media and activities.
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 TouchPoints Works and TouchPoints Works 2 publications.
> To subscribe to TouchPoints please email Dan Flynn or Belinda Beeftink
TouchPoints data adds an important dimension of emotion, which allows us to better understand consumers' behaviour. However, for us, the most exciting part of TouchPoints is the availability to overlay this emotional data with time, media consumption and other relevant actions