Choudhary's Social Intelligence Company, 4C Releases Study of Brand Audiences for TV Programming
By analyzing public Facebook data, 4C is helping networks make intelligent programming decisions and enabling brands to more strategically place relevant advertisements both on television and on Facebook.
4C, a social intelligence and platform, founded by Prof. Alok Choudhary, John G. Searle Professor in partnership with Facebook has conducted a study to show the relationship between public Facebook behavioral data and television broadcast programming.
By analyzing public Facebook data, 4C is helping networks make intelligent programming decisions and enabling brands to more strategically place relevant advertisements both on television and on Facebook. Prof. Choudhary founded 4C, and acts as its chairman and chief scientist, to focus on using data science to analyze the world's largest collection of publicly available social data to generate true marketing intelligence.
While some results were unsurprising (the strongest link for alcohol brand audiences is with SportsCenter), less predictable results included users engaged with financial services brands seeming to prefer reality TV.
The research—what 4C calls “affinity” data—is aimed at allowing media buyers, TV media planners, and networks to leverage social media activity for their advertising strategies. The company assigns each show a “4C Score,” a relative score on a 0-100 scale of how receptive a brand’s followers might be to a certain show or vice versa.
The study was commissioned by Facebook, which wants to increase the effectiveness of its user data for TV audience analytics. It’s why the company also partnered with Neilsen’s Cross-Platform Campaign Ratings (XCR) tool in an effort to measure the link between Facebook and TV audience reach.
In January, 4C raised $5 million in Series B funding.
KEY HIGHLIGHTS/FINDINGS:
- 4C's platform analyzed Facebook's public anonymized aggregate data to evaluate the intersection of user engagement and television programs.
- It analyzed 150+ brands across five major verticals and more than 800 programs across 14 broadcast and cable television networks, and explored how to apply public Facebook data to improve television and Facebook ad decision making.
- The research reaffirmed some common media planning practices, such as placing hair care product commercials during daytime programming.
- More importantly, the analysis uncovered unexpected new connections that can help brands create more relevant marketing campaigns, such as a link between financial services and reality TV.
IMMEDIATE BENEFITS:
- Brand managers and agency planners gain intelligent insights to help inform how best to pair TV and Facebook media together.
- Media agencies improve ad investments by enhancing the success of ad placements on Facebook in concert with TV programs
- Networks can make programming decisions based on audience engagement and affinities and can work with brands to place relevant advertisements both on TV and via Facebook
ABOUT 4C:
This social intelligence platform, collects public social data and applies its proprietary data science algorithms to determine the affinities between audiences and brands. It combines more than 20 years of Northwestern University research in computational science by Chief Scientist, Dr. Alok Choudhary, with proven advertising acumen to reveal new audience insight for brands and agencies. It is one of a handful of companies worldwide that is both a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Ads and Insights partner, and is Twitter Ads Certified. The company has offices in Chicago, New York, Seattle and Singapore. For more information, visit their website.
Read more of the Reuters, Adexchanger, and WFMJ articles.