Super touchpoint planning: Teaching new dogs old tricks
Opinion
Not all impressions are equal and different touchpoints generate varying levels of effectiveness. But how often do brands take all of these factors into account? This is where super touchpoint planning comes in.
If you hang around in this industry long enough, you notice that pretty much everything is cyclical.
The engagement debate becomes the attention debate; relevance becomes personalisation; owned media becomes retail media; and everything becomes AI.
It’s with this thought in mind that the concept of super touchpoint planning is simultaneously going to be old news for some but new news for many.
Touchpoints-based planning has been around for a couple of decades now. Popularised by the IPA’s TouchPoints survey, it deals with the intense fragmentation that defines the media landscape while acknowledging that not all impressions are equal: they are time-of-day-specific; they are mood-specific; they are platform/device-specific; and they are location- and context-specific.
Intuitively planners have always known that an ad for a luxury holiday that appears in the Financial Times or in a high-quality coffee-table brochure delivered through the mail gives off a radically different impression of the brand than if it appears on Joe Bloggs’ Fishing Website. And these differences are not just down to differences in audience profile.
They’re also to do with when, where and how the ad is presented and absorbed. They are to do with how trusted the environment is (either the surrounding media content or the space in which you view it — eg. in the home or out of home).
And they’re to do with how creatively the marketing comms is presented; how much attention it captures; and whether it seamlessly integrates with comms viewed across other channels.
Plus, crucially, whether it stimulates you emotionally and “gets you in in feels”.
The effectiveness challenge
Different touchpoints also generate different levels of effectiveness.
It depends on how susceptible the media environment is to ad fraud; how transparent the measurement of results is; how effective its targeting capabilities are; and how capable the channel is at having full-funnel impact (from acquiring new customers to retaining them to igniting households conversations). Effectiveness differs across the board.
Dr Grace Kite’s recent narrative around “lots of littles” adding up to more than the sum of their parts perfectly captures the contemporary effectiveness challenge faced by marketers in the era of fragmentation.
Breaking down these channels into their component touchpoints and understanding the synergies across each one should be a fundamental cornerstone of good planning.
Say no to inertia
Yet how often are marketers explicitly considering all of these factors in a joined-up and coherent way?
If we’re truthful with ourselves, the answer is probably “sometimes, at best”.
Marketers and planners are under more time pressure than ever before and constantly being asked to do more with less. As a result, the path of least resistance is the one forged. We look for a bit of cost-effective reach and frequency for those national brand campaigns and optimise towards response and return on investment with our performance activity.
All other deeper considerations are falling by the wayside, yet it is absolutely imperative that planners push back against this inertia and get far more granular with the scrutiny of their plans earlier in the process.
Knowing your super touchpoints
This is where super touchpoints planning comes in.
Defined by a group of organisations including Jicmail, the Data & Marketing Association, System1, Barclaycard, the British Heart Foundation, People’s Postcode Lottery, MG OMD, VML and the IPA, super touchpoints are high-attention and high-trust segments of channels that are highly transparent and measurable.
They are rich in creative opportunity, deliver sensory marketing comms and can have impact throughout the customer journey.
Crucially, any channel has the potential to have super touchpoints working within it (although some are more hidden than others and many channels might be carrying average or underperforming touchpoints).
But we’re encouraging marketers to sense-check their media plans using a STEP (super touchpoints evaluation points) score and there is a straw-man framework detailing over 30 key questions that should be used to evaluate future and existing plans.
Planning common sense
The crucial decision is then how to act on the results. If your channels contain below-average touchpoints, do you down-weight or divest your plans of them? And if they contain super touchpoints, do you consider disproportionately higher investment for disproportionately more effective outcomes?
Marketers don’t want to constantly be told to do more with less. They’d like to do even more with more, thanks very much.
But we’re only going to get there if we invest in truly effective marketing outcomes, stop being spoon-fed our media plans and start to apply some planning common sense alongside the raft of new channels, platforms and planning data sources now available.
Walk the walk, prove marketing effectiveness, grow marketing budgets and avoid a race to the bottom. Easy for me to say, right?
An invitation to agencies
But it’s with these principles in mind that Jicmail welcomes any agency planner to work with us to apply the super touchpoints evaluation framework to their media plans — whether they are mail users or not.
We believe that, when you do, the super touchpoint channels will rise to the top, the full potential of their context will be realised and the results will speak for themselves.
The principles of super touchpoint planning, plus a case for why mail scores highly as a super touchpoint, are laid out in this paper from Jicmail, released at its annual conference recently.
It’s time to stop outsourcing our critical thinking and apply some good old-fashioned common sense to our media plans.
Ian Gibbs is director of data leadership and learning at Jicmail