The ad tech firm 4C has deals with all the biggest media companies

“Avengers: Age of Ultron”

• The ad tech/social analytics startup 4C has been inking
  deals with a string of huge ad players, ranging from
  NBCUniversal to Facebook to Snapchat.
• Now the company has a similar deal with
  Amazon.
• 4C is promising advertisers a way to connect nearly all
  of their digital and traditional media spending in a single
  digital interface/buying platform.
• But coordinated TV and digital advertising is rife with
  complications. And its an area that most ad agencies and
  enterprise software giants like Adobe are also charging
  toward.

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4C says it can help marketers see everything. And based on its
string of media and tech deals, it may be getting close.

The under-the-radar startup has plugged its ad buying tech into a
who’s who of advertising giants, including NBCUniversal,
Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, Instagram, Pinterest, and
Snapchat.

Now ad to the list the
hottest company in advertising — Amazon.

Specifically, using 4C’s
Scope platform, advertisers can now manage, analyze, and execute
ad campaigns across all these platforms, the company says. That
now includes Amazon’s powerful product listing ads, a massive
growth business for the e-commerce juggernaut.

So what does that mean exactly?
And why are all these companies working with yet another ad
tech/analytics firm?

After all, lots of social media
buying companies are tapped into the
APIs (application program
interface) of giants like Facebook and Twitter, so
they can suck out data and use it to automatically buy
ads.

And there are plenty of analytics
companies promising to unify
marketing data across platforms.

4C wants to be the bridge between TV and digital ad
data

4C has raised over $31
million in venture funding since launching in 2011. And ad
industry insiders say it has impressed with both its product and
data science chops while also understanding marketers’ thinking.
One of the cofounders is a data
science professor at Northwestern. 
The other is a former agency
guy.

The company is attempting to work
both with the biggest digital companies and TV giants as it aims
to help advertisers tie together all of their ad buying data in
one place at a time when the industry is hungry to unify media
buying.

Initially, 4C helped advertisers
users data and analytics tactically, like say syncing ads on
Twitter and Facebook to TV campaigns.

More recently the company has
tried to position itself as uniquely able to help marketers
reconcile how their campaigns are working across multiple
channels, rather than planning in silos. How many people am I
reaching on Facebook? NBC? Are they they same people? Are they
getting the right message? And so on.

“The problem for the buy side is there’s not a comprehensive way
to buy media,” said Terry Kawaja,
CEO of Luma Partners, particularly when Facebook and Google
control so much data and budgets. “

“You gotta have a holistic view, and there are just not a
lot of solutions to do that. So they are probably positioned
pretty well for the where the ecosystem is going to go. They are
early movers in actually having a product.”

For example, NBCU has entrusted 4C with helping facilitate
one of its first forays into selling TV ads through software for
big
brands like Target.

Advertisers are struggling with how best to allocate media
budgets across screens

Indeed, this so called ‘cross
channel’ or ‘omnichannel’ media buying is where much of the ad
industry wants to go. It’s not going to be easy, given people’s
rapidly changing media habits.

“Consumers are bouncing from platform to platform, screen to
screen, and advertisers need to reach people all over the place
at different times,” Lance
Neuhauser, CEO of 4C, said. “So they need one central
view. That takes a lot of hard math work.”

Ad buyers say 4C’s idea of unifying analytics and buying across
different media makes a lot of sense. But it’s not always easy to
execute in practice. One ad buyer called the process of melding
data sets across traditional and digital media for buying
purposes “clunky” in its current iteration.

And giant ad buying shops like GroupM and Denstu are building
their own data tools designed to help them reconcile who they’re
reaching with ads in different media. Enterprise software giants
such as Adobe and Oracle are promising marketers access to some
sort of digital dashboard where they can synchronize all their
consumer data and track every dime they spend on advertising.

Bryan Benavides, director of
marketing for the retailer ABT
Electronics, said that since he’s started working with 4C,
he’s seen a 5x return on his ad spending investment. “It really
helps us figure out how to move money around, from Facebook to
Pinterest, etc. There’s a single interface where you can
manage budgets appropriately, find new
audiences. It’s all
based on ROI.”

However, to date, ABT hasn’t used 4C to connect social media
advertising to TV. That’s where things could get more
complicated.

Neuhauser acknowledged how
difficult that mission is. “This is new technology
that requires a shift in thinking that moves away from the
traditional process of buying media,” he said. “That said, we are
always working to improve the product.” 

Amazon is another feather in 4C’s cap

In terms of landing Amazon, Neuhauser sees 4C bringing
the company a new set of advertisers, while also helping more
brands connect the dots between TV campaigns and e-commerce
results, for example.

Down the road, as Amazon gets deeper into more forms of
advertising, the bet is that 4c can come along for the ride.

“We want to help shepherd in that
era and future,” he said.

So do a lot of companies. The
question will be whether advertisers will eventually want to go
all in with one partner.

“It makes a ton of sense because it’s where any agency worth its
salt is focused on getting,” said Maikel O’Hanlon
VP, Social Media Strategy at Horizon Media.

“The age old determination for agencies is whether they build it
themselves … or do they entrust a partner to be the solution?”