The ad tech firm 4C has inked deals with pretty much every company that matters in media- and it just nabbed a premier partnership with Amazon

"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.

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?"