Why TouchPoints brings media plans together

blockbuster hype already labelling it as "the missing link" between
media's research currencies.

Since the industry made clear its desire for a cross-media planning tool
capable of translating the different currencies into something
approaching a unified language, the media market has simultaneously
fragmented and converged faster than anyone could have predicted. If
there was a pressing need in 2004 to sit consumers down and find out how
they really interact with different media, the requirement for that
information in 2006 is essential.

"It's a cliche, but with so much content being made available in so many
different ways, it is really important to be able to look at data like
this and see where people are and what they are doing with their lives,"
says Mick Mernagh, director of MediaCom's Real World Insight
department.

As the IPA prepares to raise the curtain on phase one, those agencies
that sponsored the research have already begun to get to grips with the
findings. Phase two is still to come in May, when the original survey is
integrated with data from measurement organisations like Rajar, Postar,
Jicreg (the main currency used for regional press advertising), Barb and
the NRS.

This initial hub database is built from the results of a gruelling
48-page media and lifestyle questionnaire, added to real-time details of
the panel's activities over the course of a week and updated at
half-hourly intervals via PDA. This data reveals what the 5,000 members
of the panel were doing, where and with whom, what mood they were in
and, crucially, what media they were using at any given time.

"The hub survey covers a whole wealth of qualitative and quantitive
aspects of media usage, lifestyles and attitudes," says Lynne Robinson,
research director of the IPA. "That data is all time-based, so it's very
much three-dimensional, but it's a huge database and people will need to
get used to using it."

In May, RSMB Television Research Ltd will contribute the media
probability calculations that is intended to transform TouchPoints from
a fascinating lifestyle database into a single-source cross-media
research tool - one which promises to enable mixed-media planning by
acting as a hub for the existing currencies.

Whether they know it or not, the 5,000 individuals who completed their
questionnaires and dutifully updated their PDAs at half-hour intervals
over seven days may have contributed to a major evolution in the media's
attitude towards research.

Fundamental shift

"I think TouchPoints could create a fundamental shift in the way
industry research moves forward," claims Sue Elms, managing director of
Carat Insight. "It's not going to deliver a seamless planning system, or
one that every company uses, but what it will do is challenge the status
quo. This is the moment when fusion modelling suddenly comes of
age."

At minimum, the 5,000 respondents, recruited through the TNS Access
Panel, have given the industry some very interesting data to play with.
"If I had the time, I could sit and analyse it all year and still get
interesting things out of it," says Alex Maddox, managing director of
media planning software specialist Telmar, which has already loaded the
hub survey detailing the day-to-day media habits of the TouchPoints
respondents into its CrossTab program.

The results of the initial survey are already understood to be making
waves. "We have held two TouchPoints open days already to illustrate the
wealth of data and the new types of analysis that are now possible,"
says Maddox. "We have never had an open day before where clients were
queuing up to play with the test data."

Telmar has handled diary data before - it has loaded the BBC's Daily
Life survey since the 1980s - but it has invested significantly in
CrossTab in preparation for the arrival of TouchPoints. "There is so
much information in what we have got already, never mind when the data
for which it was designed comes out in May," says Maddox.

The IPA's other technology partners, IMS, KMR and Pointlogic, have all
poured the new data into their own adapted software. "We have made a few
changes to our CrossTab system, but it is the same software people use
to look at the National Readership Survey or TGI," says Paul Baynton,
managing director of IMS UK. "This is a different type of data to what
people are used to, but they will already be used to the software."

The software partners are all awaiting further details of the second
phase before finalising plans for their own versions of the
single-source, cross-media planning tool. "We still don't know exactly
what format we are going to get that data in, but we know it will fit
one of our existing systems," says Baynton.

Once it is fully rolled out, the strength of TouchPoints promises to be
the way it engages with existing currencies, which all only account for
the part of the market which consumes a given medium. TouchPoints' data
starts with the consumer and works outwards, giving a rare picture of
the way those media overlap.

"Rather than researching the channel, to research the person is a really
good thing to do," says Mernagh. "It's a very strong piece of work, both
in theory and, now that the data is coming out, in practice too," he
says, while acknowledging his own interest as a member of the IPA work
party that oversaw TouchPoints' implementation.

But if the media industry is partial to TouchPoints, that was always the
idea. "The thing about TouchPoints is it has been done by the industry,
for the industry," says Anderson. "The whole premise was the fact that
we felt there was a perceived lack of professionalism in the industry
tools we had available to us, in that they didn't measure the market.
TouchPoints was designed to fill that gap."

Jason Brownlee, research director at Other Lines of Enquiry, was head of
Emap's market research division, Insight, when the TouchPoints wagon
started rolling, and he was instrumental in getting the media group
involved.

"My hope was that it would finally break down that
primary-media-vs-secondary-media way of looking at planning, which TV
always managed to profit from," he says. "Given that I was working for a
publishing and radio group, that could only be in our interests."

Brownlee has had no involvement in the survey since leaving Emap, but he
remains a fervent supporter of its aims.

"I hope it gives us a much more holistic approach to planning
communications, based around a consumer's habits and lifestyle. If it
can do that, as it promises to, I think it will be a very effective
tool," he says.

TouchPoints may be touted as the missing link, but it is not intended to
act as a cross-media currency in its own right. The
anthropomorphically-minded Brownlee variously describes that coveted
goal as "a yeti" - often talked about, never seen - and as a media Moby
Dick, sent to drive researchers mad.

"There's a couple of Captain Ahabs out there," he says. "They are out
looking for the perfect research brief and they still think it is a
multimedia trading currency. I just think, let it go, it's going to kill
you."

The TouchPoints hub may yet be successful enough in tying the media
currencies together to head off calls for such a currency. Indeed,
according to the IPA's Robinson, if TouchPoints can encourage the
different media channels to relate more closely to one another, it will
have done a large part of its job.

"I think we are almost at a tipping point with this," she says. "The
industry data we have is unable really to expand. If you look at the
composition of all the JICs, they are paid for by the media owners
involved, and they're not going to pay to measure other media.

They are caught up in their own political and financial straitjackets,
whereas TouchPoints is designed so we can help them move out of
that."

Exactly how well TouchPoints will do this part of its job has to remain
something of a mystery until May at the earliest. In fact, given the
reputed complexity of the three-dimensional, time-based data in hand,
some believe it will be many more months before TouchPoints begins to
unlock its potential in the hands of agency planners.

"I wouldn't expect anyone to have anything good or bad to say about it
until June or July," says Jo Rigby, head of OMD Insight, who has been
training OMD's planners in the use of the new data since early
March.

"It's such a big thing to get your head around, it's going to take quite
a few months for people to feel familiar with the data and make sure
they are using it in the right way."

Rigby says OMD's confidence in the IPA's project management is such that
the agency is already working on ways of linking TouchPoints in with its
own proprietary planning tool, Communigraphics. All the same, she stops
short of a declaration of blind faith in TouchPoints as the industry's
cross-media saviour.

"We won't really know until we have got the integrated hub data as well
- the really telling time will be after May," says Rigby.

It seems churlish to point out that while TouchPoints will launch as the
last word in consumer lifestyle and media data, developments in the US
are already pointing towards the step beyond.

"In the absence of bigger, more important developments in technology,
something like TouchPoints is helping ... but, long-term, if the
communications industry is going to prove its value, it has to find a
measurement device that measures people's exposure to through-the-line
and links it in to sales figures," says Jim Taylor, planning partner at
Mediaedge:cia.

Across the pond, the VNU/Arbitron joint venture Project Apollo aims to
do exactly that, tracking multimedia exposure and purchase behaviour
using Arbitron's Portable People Meter - a passive, pager-style device
that - in theory - eliminates potential human error.

"TouchPoints is exactly the right way to do this right now, but it still
requires you or me to record everything we are doing on a regular
basis," says MediaCom's Mernagh.

"Whereas if we had a little pager on our belts recording everything we
are exposed to, that gives real-time exposure without human error and
that is the way things might go."

But with that technology still in its evolutionary stages, TouchPoints
constitutes the leading edge in media-audience research. Or rather, it
certainly promises to. Thursday will bring the best indication of
whether it stands to fulfil that potential. Not surprisingly, the launch
is already a sell-out.

HOW PLANNERS' LIVES WILL CHANGE

Amid the talk of holistic solutions and single-source tools, there
remains the question of exactly how much practical difference
TouchPoints will make to media planners.

Carat Insight's Sue Elms has fed the TouchPoints data into the agency's
own Cameo system, created by IMS with data from Carat's own CCS panel as
its hub. She believes cross-media tools such as these can help level the
playing field between specialist and generalist planners and enhance
integration across the board.

"The communications planner will sit at the hub with the internet stuff
in front of them, as well as the press and the TV and the outdoor and
the coffee cups, in our case," says Elms.

"Within companies, it will allow the generalist communications planners
to do their job better."

In terms of the effect on the media plan itself, there is a likelihood
that TouchPoints will be of greatest significance to the smaller media,
attempting to make the case for the multiplier effect. If nothing else,
technological insight looks likely to spell the end of the
back-of-a-fag-packet media plan.

"In terms of the way media money is spent, I think it will mean people
looking harder at the weight of usage in what you might call the
secondary media," says Elms. "You might just assume, for instance, that
if you stick some press against a TV campaign, there will be a
multiplier effect. But it may be that those campaigns need to use more
press than they currently do to ensure that multiplicational
impact."

IPA RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

The IPA's Lynne Anderson itemises the main points of contention with the
standard of media industry research as follows: the cost (around £30m a year), the negative PR surrounding the JICs and their currencies,
the fact that controversy around the currencies was undermining the
industry's professional image, and the crucial point that all of the
existing research was single-media based.

After detailed consultation with agency planning directors, the IPA
launched its TouchPoints pilot in late 2004 with five stated aims:

- To provide a planning resource that would give fresh insight into
consumers' behaviour, their lifestyles and exposuremedia

- To consider media channels impartially and reveal the ways in which
they are used singly and together, as well as when and for how long they
are used

- To create a hub to marry the disparate media and enable mixed-media
scheduling from a single source

- To give a holistic view of communication opportunities and to provide
"a stepping stone towards critical communication issues"

- To allow for the post-campaign evaluation of mixed-media campaigns

WILL THERE EVER BE A CROSS-MEDIA CURRENCY?

YES, but ...

"I don't think a currency is going to happen before most people have
pressed ahead with this sort of multi-impact, TouchPoints-type research
approach. To all intents and purposes, although we might end up with a
comparable measurement system across different media, by the time it
comes into effect we will have moved quite a long way down the road in
terms of the types of research and analysis we can apply. We can get
around the lack of a cross-media currency in the modelling work we are
now starting to do."

Justin Charlton-Jones, global tracking director, Ipsos-ASI

NO

"Anyone who has ever had to work on a Rajar or NRS committee knows that,
even within a medium, the vested interests and the general difficulty in
reconciling everybody's needs usually leave single-media currencies
looking like something of a fudge. Trading currencies are conventions
that rest on the good faith of people who decide to suspend their
disbelief. We know it doesn't totally reflect reality, but it does a
good enough job that we will accept the numbers. If you get that
agreement, great - you can start trading. But if it is that difficult to
get it to work with one medium, you are pissing in the wind if you think
you can get all the different media to agree on a single currency."

Jason Brownlee, research director, Other Lines of Enquiry

MAYBE

"If you had done TouchPoints 10 years ago, it would have become the
currency, because the whole media market was more static, there were
fewer variants. As it is, I think the media world is changing faster
than TouchPoints will be able to keep up with. TouchPoints is about
adding up the contacts of pretty much the main media and communications
plans are linking into a plethora of other things now. I think
TouchPoints is going to help people create their own currencies, and I
think it will help to challenge the lazy assumption that if you do a
multi-media campaign, everybody is going to be hit by everything."

Sue Elms, managing director, Carat Insight.