NEWS26 July 2010

Media measurement coalition in talks to fund US Touchpoints survey

North America

US— The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) is in talks to fund the US version of the UK’s Touchpoints survey of consumer multimedia usage.

CIMM – a consortium of major US media owners and advertisers including AT&T, CBS, News Corporation, Procter & Gamble and Time Warner – is holding discussions with the Touchpoints US licensee, the Media Behaviour Institute, and hopes to have reached a decision on whether to back the research by the end of the summer.

Methodological issues and the cost of the work are still being debated. A CIMM spokesman told Research “everything is on the table” during the discussions. A report in the Wall Street Journal quotes a $1m price tag for the research, citing unnamed sources. Touchpoints cost £1m on its first outing in the UK in 2006.

Earlier this year, MBI appointed GfK’s Mediamark Research (MRI) to run the US version of the survey, with plans to recruit respondents via MRI’s Survey of the American Consumer, an annual face-to-face study of 26,000 people covering their usage of nearly 6,000 product and service brands across 550 categories, along with magazines and newspaper readership, internet usage, TV viewership, national and local radio listening, Yellow Pages usage and out-of-home media exposure.

Around 1,000 people are expected to be invited to take part in the Touchpoints project, with each being given an iPhone installed with a diary application (pictured) to allow them to record where they are, what they are doing and what media they are consuming at half-hour intervals over a 10-day period.

@RESEARCH LIVE

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