Yesterday I was fortunate to be able to attend the IPA event TouchPoints In Action at the Royal Institute of British Architects. There were several speakers from the industry and the IPA that all touched upon how TouchPoints have been and could be used.
What is TouchPoints?
TouchPoints is a comprehensive media consumption survey that studies people’s use and interaction with various media channels that was developed by the IPA. It covers the basics like how many hours people have spent online (or watching TV, or reading newspapers, etc), to when, where and what media and content is consumed. This can then be sliced and diced any which way you could imagine.
For example, the chart below illustrates media consumption over the course of a day. Radio is big in the morning (morning commute), with TV (the red line) winning big time in the evening.
Media consumption by channel over a day
One thing it can also be used for is fusion projects. A fusion project in this sense meaning the fusing of one profile of people with their corresponding media consumption. For example, you want to understand what media your tobacco smoking audience consume. So you create/fuse the profile of smokers, and out pops their media habits.
Key Insights from TouchPoints
1. One the key insights I saw from the presentations was on the effectiveness of using multiple channels. This was from a meta-analysis of award entries of the IPA Effectiveness awards.
What this chart shows is that more is better, but on the other hand you have to weigh the increased cost of using multiple channels with the reduced increase in effectiveness.
2. A case study by Stuart McDonald from News International illustrated how TouchPoints was used to refocus their editorial effort to different channels for different times of the day. E.g. focus on papers for the morning, while shifting to on-line customised content in the afternoons and evenings.
Overall the meeting was very informative and I believe TouchPoints is a great tool to do media planning and channel optimisation. If you want to find out more, follow the links below to the IPA.
More information
