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.

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

TouchPoints 2023 reveals significant impacts of the cost of living crisis:

• Almost 40% of Britons aren’t coping on their current salaries;
• GB Adults hey are spending over an hour longer indoors against pre-lockdown 2020
• 60% are looking for the lowest prices when shopping, and
• when it comes to longer-term plans - from moving out of their parents’ homes, to changing jobs, to retiring - they are pressing pause.

These are just some of the arresting findings from the 2023 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 3,000 GB adults aged 15+, between January and March 2023.

Find out more by watching the video of the TouchPoints 2023 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 2023 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 2023 IPA TouchPoints data, the IPA has published the fifth 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, and what is happening post-COVID. Making Sense - The commercial media landscape is an annual publication and the 6th edition will be published in March 2024.

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.