TouchPoints Database To Be Reconfigured For Usability

The TouchPoints integrated planning database is to be reconfigured to make it more relevant to users, according to Lynne Robinson, research director at the IPA, who was speaking on the panel at yesterday’s MediaTel Group ‘Future of Media Research’ seminar.

She admitted that the package, which aims to create a single cross-media planning system, was “by no means perfect”, but that it should not be judged on just its first year in operation, offering that TGI took 10-15 years to establish itself.

The original integrated planning database was a “great example of people not being able to tell you what they want until they got it in front of them, and it actually wasn’t that,” she said.

She also acknowledged that the system was taking its time to assimilate into usage, particularly in terms of wider usage within companies, but that advertisers were publicly very supportive of it.

A number of impressive case histories are being built up through usage of TouchPoints said Robinson. These, according to Richard Silman, non-executive chairman of Ipsos, will be key to selling the service.

Silman also agreed that it was unfair to judge the success of the IPA’s initiative in its infancy, saying that in his experience (which includes previously running TGI) syndicated research studies generally take between three and five years to achieve market acceptance.

On the whole, the panellists were full of praise for TouchPoints, with David Brennan, research and strategy director at Thinkbox, the only person to express some concern, saying that the system was not particularly useful for television.

“It saddens me when one of the limitations of what I think is a major new initiative… is that people have to think about what they want before they actually go and use it,” he said.

“Spending time thinking about what we want from the data in the first place might actually be a really good discipline to bring back into the industry,” he added, saying the industry was spoilt by the deluge of data available.

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