Today (6 May 2021) 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 were shared from across the industry at the IPA TouchPoints 2021 launch event and have been captured in a new publication, Talking TouchPoints, that looks back at 15 years of the ground-breaking tool. The publication covers:
- A foreword from Les Binet, Group Head of Effectiveness, adam&eveDDB.
- A retrospective on the landscape via TouchPoints from 2005-2020
- Case studies detailing how some of the biggest advertisers have used TouchPoints, including Tesco’s (Nick Ashley, Tesco, and Francesca Blair, MediaCom), WWE (by Graeme Adams, BT) and Coty UK by Susie Thompson.
- Top tips for using TouchPoints from both agency and media owner subscribers.
- TouchPoints’ most popular case studies from the last 15 years, including Stroke Savers, PHE/Wavemaker; Baileys/Carat; Vodafone/OMD; and Kinetic.
Since its creation in 2005, TouchPoints has gone from being a biennial to annual study, it has pioneered the usage of passive data collection for smartphones and tablets, it has launched its own analysis tool for TouchPoints in DayLite (recently adding qualitative capability), and it has empowered users with respondent-level TouchPoints data for integration into proprietary planning systems and tools. It also produces an annual TouchPoints report – Making Sense: The Commercial Media Landscape.
Due to the invaluable insights into the daily habits and media moments of their target markets, it is now used by all of the major media agencies and across the spectrum by media owners, and it has a much wider industry relevance – Ofcom uses TouchPoints data extensively, as well as the BBC who uses it alongside their own data. This year has seen further integrations, with agencies fusing TouchPoints to their own data sets, Sky using TouchPoints in its Cflight solution, and BARB using TouchPoints in its BVoD planner. BARB has also fused TouchPoints on to BARB to enable the use of TouchPoints-generated targets against BARB campaigns.
Today also marked the launch of the 2021 TouchPoints data, detailing the impact of lockdown life on British consumers at the start of this year.
We’re exceptionally proud to be celebrating 15 years of TouchPoints, and the fact that it is stronger and more relevant now than it has ever been really is testament to all of the hard work that has gone into making TouchPoints what it is – the industry standard for cross-media measurement. From its inception, TouchPoints was created based not on what we thought the industry wanted, but what the industry specified that they needed in a rapidly advancing world of media choice.
Says Les Binet, Group Head of Effectiveness at adam&eveDDB: "As far as I know, TouchPoints is still the only readily available data source that measures all media on a like-for-like basis. And because TouchPoints has been doing that for 15 years, it can now give us a fantastic bird’s-eye view of the changing media landscape."
Says Belinda Beeftink, Research Director, IPA: "Over the past 15 years TouchPoints has become a must-have tool for anyone working in communication and media planning, buying and selling. Indeed, TouchPoints is a must have for anyone wanting to understand the perspective and context of media consumption today. The next 15 years will undoubtedly have their challenges, but we will continue to ensure and highlight TouchPoints’ value, relevance and importance as an industry data source. TouchPoints has always shown us that media, and our use of it, is continually evolving and we are proud that we can continue to map that change for the industry in the future."
Download the Talking TouchPoints report
Last updated 01 May 2024