IPA TouchPoints Goes Live
The IPA has launched the next stage of the TouchPoints integrated planning database, which is a major step towards enhancing media planning across the industry.
The system brings together a wealth of data into an integrated planning system that is able to create a single source measurement of likely contact across all media.
“[TouchPoints] is something that we’ve been struggling and aiming for for the past 25 years or so,” said Jim Marshall, chairman of Starcom UK and chairman of IPA Media Futures Group, at the product’s launch this morning.
“It’s a sort of nirvana of media planning, but more importantly it reflects the world that we live in now and that we will increasingly live in in the future, which is about integrated communications planning and it provides a common language and a currency.
“It does not provide all the answers but it’s there for the media agencies and the creative agencies to have a better understanding of how people are behaving in terms of their media consumption.”
Marshall believes that the TouchPoints philosophy is entirely unique in that it is consumer-centric, unlike all standard media currencies, which are media-centric. The system will look at how people are behaving, and the “what, when and how, and how it overlaps, giving us insights into why people are using media,” he said.
Guy Murphy, deputy chairman and head of strategic planning at creative agency BBH, was keen to stress that it is much more than just media data and is in fact “consumer data”, or “life data”.
“With all research we need to be sure of the interpretations and recommendations we make,” he said. “We need to understand and know what the assumptions are in the software and that all touch points are treated equally in the planning tool. There is no perfect data in the world and clients understand that.”
Murphy believes that putting the system into the culture is the next important step. “Perhaps the hardest thing is not to understand how to work this thing… it’s making it a habit in an organisation,” he said. “Getting into that rhythm is the hard thing.”
Lynne Robinson, research director at the IPA, said the system, which offers a “wealth of information beyond demographics”, has received a tremendous reception in the UK and overseas, and has been sold to over 40 different companies already.
As of next week, TouchPoints will be fused with TGI, enabling another dimension of consumer understanding. The IPA is also planning to carry out another TouchPoints initiative next year in the UK and hopefully extend the remit to other countries who have expressed a keen interest.
Robinson said that the project was probably the most ambitious integration process ever undertaken [by RSMB], certainly in the UK. “In the next few months we’re expecting the current TouchPoints initiative to bed into the UK market, where we will be working with our subscribers to evolve the system,” she said. “It is completely new and they have got to come to grips with it and decide what they want to do with it. It will be an evolving thing, so as to gain the maximum benefit from the investment.”
She also said that the IPA was simulating basic currencies for the internet, SMS and direct mail, which do not have their own industry currencies at the moment. “It’s quite a large problem. It is proving quite a difficult task in terms of simulating internet data even into a basic currency as well,” she said.
“It’s quite difficult to know what you simulate to, certainly from an internet point of view. Given the culture within the UK [of the boom of the internet] it is very important for them to develop an industry currency that will allow them to plan the internet alongside other media and also make it ‘relateable’ to other media as well.”
Bob Wootton, director of media and advertising at ISBA, echoed this view. “I think it’s a huge, overhanging issue in the industry,” he said of the lack of an internet planning currency. “It is fascinating that the most progressive and fast moving medium that we’ve ever seen come into the market is quite slow, it’s been overtaken by its own success. [This is] fantastic but I think it’s incumbent upon ISBA, the Advertising Association, the IPA to really press very hard for what is patently required.
“The issue here is about the user behaviour and what the interaction is. It’s old issues in a new media space. [The internet] is bigger than the national press and growing and the time is now.”
IPA: 020 7235 7020 www.ipa.co.uk