Social data analytics company 4C Insights has raised $5 million in Series B funding from Jump Capital. 4C originated last fall when ecommerce ad-tech company The Echo System merged with Twitter Ads API partner and Facebook PMD Voxsup, founded by Northwestern University Professor Alok Choudhary.
4C currently employs between 30-40 people, but expects to grow well past 60 in the coming months, said company CEO Lance Neuhaser (who’d previously been CEO of The Echo System).
The company is actively beefing up its product capabilities, which includes leveraging social data and brand-and-user affinity connections in much broader ways. Neuhaser said 4C uses social data as a behavioral mechanism “to understand every single marketing communication ingestion point.” One area of focus is television.
“We have significantly grown the product and the engineering team with the idea being we want to impact multiple channels,” said Choudhary, whose big data algorithm that turns social media intelligence into insights for ad targeting was the basis for Voxsup. “TV is an important aspect of that. We want to bring the use of our data and science in a way that scales to a much larger number of users and data sets.”
As Facebook, with its acquisition of SportStream and launch of Trending Topics continues to rival Twitter’s foothold in real-time, media buyers will look for more advanced ways to draw associations based on social affinity, instead of just standard geographic or demographic data.
“The reason why, to date, agencies and massive holding companies have enjoyed working with us is because of our position – we’re not in competition with them and they can train their staff on a best-of-breed technology and we can continue focusing on bringing them the best solution we can,” commented Neuhaser. “One of the reasons we’ve been able to do as much as we have at the size we are is because we are dedicated to being a licensed platform” rather than a managed-services organization.
In 2012, prior to the formation of 4C, Voxsup and The Echo System formed a partnership with VivaKi to serve as exclusive social data and ad-buying platform for Publicis Groupe agencies with an integration to VivaKi Nerve Center products. The company also works with Starcom MediaVest, T-Mobile, Microsoft and PGA.
