In an industry with no shortage of data and frequent reports into changes in the media landscape, IPA Touchpoints continues to be among the most eagerly anticipated releases. For, amidst all the forecasting and trend predictions, there are few resources better than consumers themselves to tell us what’s changing in the world around us.
The 2025 Touchpoints release, officially launched with speakers including OMG’s Vicky Fox and Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland, offers many such clues. Yet, it also shows us that change is happening both rapidly and incrementally. A gradual shift, yet everything, everywhere, and all at once.
To explain this paradox, we must look back. A decade ago, there were far fewer channels making off with sizeable chunks of our media time. Despite vastly different content preferences, the media channels used by young people were not broadly dissimilar to those used by over-55s. The media itself was less commercial; as recent Barb and RAJAR figures have shown, the BBC’s share of our AV and Audio time has waned since then.
These shifts have not happened overnight. They are the continuation of shifts in the media landscape which, with each Touchpoints release, create stronger and stronger currents. From year to year, the changes amount to a drop in the ocean; in a decade we encounter a tsunami.
And yet, Touchpoints data also reminds us that, for all the changes under the surface, the things people do with their eyeballs and ears rarely, if ever, change. Excluding the lockdown-induced hysteria of 2020 and 2021, the graph of what we do throughout the day – be that reading text, watching some form of video, listening to audio or travelling out of the home – is distinguishable from a decade ago to now. The mediums that power our habits have changed greatly, but the underlying needs that fuel them have not.
That is what makes the Touchpoints data so powerful: it serves as a reality check on the industry. This is evident from the headline stat of the 2025 launch: that commercial time spent with a mobile phone has finally overtaken time with a TV set for all adults. This trend has seemed inevitable for years, yet it is also emblematic of the power of AV that it has taken so long to finally occur.
Even then, the landscape is muddied. As Barb announced last year, TV sets have overtaken smartphones as the primary mode of YouTube viewing. Even as our media time shifts increasingly to the palm of our hands, the big screen is far from dead.
Resources like Touchpoints may only come around once a year, but they are a timely reminder that we must follow the trail left by consumers – or risk being carried away by the tides of change.
