TouchPoints: reaching the parts others fail to monitor

Touting it as the “missing link” between the industry’s various research currencies, the IPA set out to create a picture of a consumer’s entire media consumption throughout the day, joining together the single media currencies within a multimedia hub.

It is the brainchild of the reengineered IPA Media Futures Group, which in its new proactive mode, decided to tackle the industry’s grumblings about media research head on.

So how will such an ambitious project work and can it solve the industry’s need for more integrated planning?

Sceptics’ warning

The prospect of such a tool has quickened pulses throughout the industry and met with almost universal approval, but the scheme does have its detractors.

Sceptics warn the burden on consumers to record their media consumption on a half-hourly basis for an entire week could be too great, while others are worried that the way in which the data is collated could undermine the value of the planning profession.

Lynne Robinson, IPA research director, says TouchPoints was very much a response to demand, “There was a level of concern about the industry currencies and a lot of internal turbulence,” she explains.

Calls for a single measurement system that spanned the industry had persisted for many years, but the technicalities of such an initiative – not to mention the financial and political dilemmas it would engender from an industry that remains firmly silobased – were huge.

The IPA realised that the key to creating integrated thinking across media research would depend on placing the consumer, rather than the medium, at the centre of the survey.

“People don’t live in silos,” says Jim Marshall, chairman of Starcom UK group and chair of the IPA Media Futures Group.

The IPA knew that, as the trade body for the media agency industry, it – rather than the research bodies or media owners themselves – was ideally placed to bring the industry together.

The TouchPoints survey consists of two main parts. It begins with the hub survey in which 5,000 adults will be interviewed on their demographics and lifestyle and media habits.

Following this, the same respondents will be asked to keep a PDA diary of their media habits on a half-hourly basis for a period of a week.

Once this is completed, the data can be fused with industry trading currencies such as Barb and Rajar, and also agencies’ bespoke tools, in order to build up a multimedia picture of consumption habits.

While fusions across research systems are already possible, TouchPoints is believed to be the only system in the world to combine research in a so-called ‘hub’.

“You can relatively easily integrate one survey onto another but the problem comes when you try to integrate a third,” says Robinson. “Integrating all the surveys onto the hub preserves the internal relationships.”

Previous fusions between research systems have been based around demographics, such as ABC1 male TV viewers and ABC1 male newspaper readers. But TouchPoints will fuse each medium onto the survey by its unique unit of measurement – that is, viewing data for Barb and readership data for the NRS.

Reach and frequency

It has been specifically designed as a planning rather than buying tool, which tend to be based on a single medium, and to give very detailed data and knowledge of the impact of media.

However, the system will measure media reach and frequency rather than the value of the exposure; all media will be treated equally, so television and the internet would be ranked as equal in terms of their value, a factor which could lead to lazy planning according to some.

Hugh Johnson, head of research at Channel 4, says there is a danger that the data could be misused.

“Planners could equate an impact on TV with half a page of a magazine but they are very different media with different strengths and weaknesses,” he says.

“If people take the data wrongly they could take half a page of an unknown magazine to have the same impact as a 30second spot.”

One agency research head said there would be some who won’t like this type of measurement.

“They think that it’ll be a case of ‘wind a handle and an answer comes out.’ They don’t have faith that planners will be able to add the value in.”

Channel 4 has not signed up as an initial partner for the project, a major concern for the broadcaster being the cost, which Johnson says would be about £100,000 for his organisation.

The initial founding partners are ITV, News International, Guardian Newspapers, AOL, BBC, Emap, Chrysalis Radio, SMG and JCDecaux. Others are expected to join.

“It’s quite a lot of money,” Johnson says. “I imagine that the survey will have to be conducted each year as the attitudes of respondents will change.

“That means that backers will be paying each year, which will work out to be quite costly.”

Robinson says the IPA and the 10 founding partners are funding the initial cost of £750,000 to £1m and will be given a rebate once other media owners and agencies subscribe.

Should it prove successful, the project would be continued on an annual basis, but the cost would be closer to £500,000 because there would be no need for pilot studies in subsequent years.

“Individually for media owners it’s quite expensive, and it’s certainly expensive for the IPA, but a lot of them feel it will be worth it,” Robinson says.

Mainstream and ambient

TouchPoints will not only cover mainstream forms of media but also ambient media, the internet, event sponsorship, SMS and direct, and will allow planners to ascertain the overlap between different media.

It is broadly assumed that TV will lose out once multimedia plans are easier to create, and Sue Elms, managing director of Carat Insight, says the new tool could overturn some long-held assumptions about media consumption.

“The assumption is that if a planner includes two or three media in a campaign they will surround a consumer and get a huge amount of duplication, but in reality that’s not the case,” Elms says.

Robinson believes that the current tools available to the industry do not match the way that communication campaigns are planned.

“There is no overall tool,” she says. “It’s a case of cobbling together using a glorified back of an envelope.”

In the first stages of creating a media campaign, planners would use the hub survey to create a broad plan, and decide where to allocate the budget.

They would then return to the specific currency for the type of media required, for example Rajar for radio, to implement the plan.

At the final stage, the planner would input back at campaign level to the hub survey in order to assess its multimedia coverage and frequency.

The IPA acknowledges that the task ahead is “very ambitious and technically quite complex” and has chosen NOP as its research partner. A pilot survey is taking place and a second pilot may follow, with a full survey covering 500 adults expected by late September this year.

Christina Hartley, chair of the Media Research Group, is pleased that a multimedia research planning tool is finally becoming a reality, after being “discussed and debated for years”.

She welcomes the usage of PDAs, as opposed to paperbased data-collation methods, but warns it may be a challenge for a respondent to record all media consumption for a week.

“It’s tough to ask one person to talk about their entire media consumption. So much of it is subliminal,” Hartley says.

“It’s onerous on a respondent to ask them to record their habits for a full seven days,” she says.

But media agencies are excited by the launch and believe it will change their daily working lives.

Mick Mernagh, director of consumer insight at MediaCom, is grateful for a system that offers a bigger picture. “My big bugbear is that what we have is different kinds of media introspectively researching itself to death, providing us with more data than we need but not accounting for the rest of a consumer’s day,” Mernagh says. “Because of the amount of media channels and options there’s a big question mark over how far a single media study can go.”

There are some hurdles ahead for the IPA TouchPoints to get off the ground, but it’s made an auspicious start.

What the industry says:

IPA research director Lynne Robinson: "The current industry tools don't match the way that communication is planned. It's a case of cobbling together using a glorified back of an envelope."

Rajar research director Paul Kennedy: "Anything that leads to a better understanding of how media is consumed is beneficial for all media industries."

National Readership Survey CEO Roger Pratt: “It's an interesting project with a lot of potential for better placed ad campaigns."

Nick North, director at GfK: “The general premise of measuring exposure to advertising across media is definitely the right way to go. The challenge lies in measuring exposure without compromising the quality of data collection.”