Lance has a fascinating background as a veteran media agency executive at Omnicom and in recent years, as a pioneering entrepreneur.
He is the co-founder of 4C Insights. Last year, the company was sold to Mediaocean where he now serves as president.
Why the name 4C? Lance explains it was the luck of airline upgrade to business class which put him in seat 4C, next to Alok Choudhary, the renowned computer scientist from Northwestern. They hit it off and the rest is history.
Great conversation with Lance about leadership, innovation, omni-channel marketing, and his personal commitment to music education for all kids.
Special thanks to Lance and the Mediaocean crew for being the sponsor of this new season of the BeetCast. I am super grateful to your longstanding support.
And thanks for listening. Hope you enjoy the episode.
]]>It’s helpful to remember the “Five I’s” when it comes to omnichannel marketing, Lance Neuhauser, president of advertising software platform Mediaocean, said in this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean.
Those “I’s” stand for independence, integration, intelligence, interoperability and impact. They’re a key part of Mediaocean’s platform after acquiring 4C Insights this year to provide more in-depth data analysis to advertisers.
“The platform needs to be independent,” Neuhauser said. “When you have all of these ecosystems being built up, you need someone who can come in and actually look across each of these ecosystems again so that the marketer can represent themselves properly to the consumer. ”
Despite that independence, marketers also need a technology solution that’s integrated with other platforms, he said. Before the acquisition by Mediaocean, Neuhauser had been CEO of 4C Insights for more than six years.
“This is one of the areas that Mediaocean was so excited about at 4C — the level of data science and engineering that we bring to the table so that Mediaocean can go from simply processing $150 billion worth of media to influencing $150 billion worth of media,” he said, “to put the right tools in the hands of both agencies and marketers.”
Interoperabilty provides more seamless functioning among platforms, while data intelligence helps to measure impact, he said.
“You have to be able to take this down to the bottom line, especially now,” Neuhauser said. “We’ve all seen businesses be stretched as a result of the circumstances that are taking place, especially in 2020, where every dollar, every message that goes in market has to be scrutinized more than ever before.”
Omnichannel marketing requires those five elements to reach consumers among a variety of media channels.
“It takes real technology to truly forge ahead in the emerging converging TV space,” Neuhauser said. “Technology needs to mirror that. It enables marketers to market the way consumers consume — all touchpoints, all moments, all screens.”
Mediaocean, whose roots go back to the 1960s with Donovan Systems, has been aggressive about buying software companies that CEO Bill Wise has described as “mini Mediaoceans” in other markets. The acquisitions include MBS and Symsys to expand into Europe, and PIN Systems and BCC AdSystems to push into the Asia-Pacific region.
You are watching “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. Please click here for more videos.
]]>We may be far from a full industry conversion to that model, but many platform vendors have certainly begun pricing themselves purely on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis.
That is only fair, according to 4C Insights CEO Lance Neuhauser in this video interview with Beet.TV. He was interviewed during NYC Advertising Week.
“We are a SaaS software license tech fee,” says the boss of the buying platform operator. “We don’t believe that the next incremental dollar of spend should mean we should keep reaching into the pockets of the marketer. That doesn’t make any sense. The best and only way to do that is to ensure that it’s a flat fee, all encompassing.”
That is the model used by 4C, whose Scope platform allows marketers to buy campaigns across Apple News, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, NBCUniversal, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat.
The latest addition to that spectrum, though, was the behemoth that is now making waves in ad land.
In August, 4C added Amazon to its roster, allowing customers to buy Sponsored Product ads alongside formats with the other publishers.
Neuhauser says that “brings one of the most dynamic marketplaces in the world to the ad ecosystem”.
He says: “They, for all intents and purposes, have the ability to tie the equivalent of linear TV through search, social, which are product reviews, ecommerce, as well as offline sales, closed loop that entire process, with addressability at the individual level.”
]]>“We have to continue to make steps forward in being able to ensure that we can tell marketers whether they’re reaching five different people across five different touch points or one person across five different touch points,” Neuhauser says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“And we need to be able to do that with a high degree of confidence.”
4C Insights’ mantra is to “empower marketers to behave more like consumers, which is multi-screen, multi-formatted,” Neuhauser adds while attending the Advanced Advertising Summit.
Whereas digital has long been considered a data-driven medium—owing to the availability of addressability, targeting and measurement—TV is on the move to close the gap.
“We knew it had premium, brand-safe environments. Now we finally get to see just how far down the funnel TV actually goes.”
Last year’s linkup between 4C and NBCUniversal, which made all of its linear inventory available via self-serve, programmatic buying on 4C’s platform, is an example of serving thousands of ad buyers “that are constantly looking to find their audience wherever, whenever they might be available to a brand message,” Neuhauser explains.
Publishers “want to be able to leverage their inventory, their audiences, the value propositions that they have to be able to once again stand in front of the marketer and say ‘you should be putting more money into my platform not less.’”
While the data ecosystem continues to evolve, a “hot topic” is the privacy compliant extraction of consumer data, according to Neuhauser.
“It puts the consumer right at the center to ensure that their information is being used appropriately and is only providing them back with better experiences, wanted experiences.”
While datasets continue to emerge, some will have to work together. But even then, complications will loom large.
“It requires a significant mathematics, significant amount of data science to be able to mesh some of these walled gardens, again at an audience level, so that it continues to improve the experience but also ensures that privacy is at the heart of all decision making,” says Neuhauser.
In the meantime, 4C will continue to “push the envelope on measurement and attribution so that marketers can continue to evolve their understanding of who they want to reach and when they want to reach them.”
This video was produced at the Advance Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>But that’s fewer than half the total number of TV households, and getting here has been a slow slog.
Yet the inertia is not stopping advertisers from embracing opportunities around TV targeting nevertheless.
“TV … has been, and still is, able to reach large audiences with multiple senses and can deliver a powerful message in the right context to great audiences at the right time,” according to Lance Neuhauser, CEO of 4C Insights, a technology company helping marketers.
“However, then digital came up – one person who has one interest shouldn’t necessarily see the same ad as another person. The infrastructure necessary to deliver those separate messages to separate household has taken time in television to build.”
“In the meantime, marketers don’t want to to stop making progress. They are looking at more than just viewing data. They are looking at viewing data in combination with social response information, in combination with CRM data, to have a better picture of the impact of each dollar that’s put in to market and how that ultimately brings back bottom-line results.”
Neuhauser is fresh from raising a $26mn Series C investment to boost geographical expansion, products and technology and sales teams.
The outfit has an integrated platform for multi-screen analytics and activation, with services including online ads synchronized to TV spots, analytics and social media ad buying.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>Now the online ad targeting outfit is tooling up for further expansion, by taking a $26m series C investment from Kayne Partners along with previous investors.
Amongst 4C’s product suit, the company variously helps advertisers target TV audiences using social data and vice versa. So why does it need more money? Speaking with Beet.TV at DMEXCO this month, CEO Lance Neuhauser explains:
4C already has inventory arrangements to place ads on the major social networks, but Neuhauser wants to go farther. Data scientists, which are said to have “the sexiest job on the planet“, don’t come cheap these days, but are in the box seat for transforming business and industry.
That’s a capability Neuhauser needs to make sense of how new data streams can help ad targeting. He says: “Social data is the largest set of digital anthropology to mankind ever.”
Recently, the company also hired a chief product officer and chief revenue officer.
This interview was taped at DMEXCO ’16. It is part of a video series of industry leaders. The series is sponsored by Videology. For more Beet.TV coverage of DMEXCO, please visit this page.
]]>“There’s a bit of both conversation and concern that TV is going to move all the way down the funnel and be a direct-response medium,” Launce Neuhauser tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “(That) negates one of the biggest benefits that TV has, which is its ability to reach large audiences and change brand preference.”
Neuhauser says advertisers are going to need TV – but the reason may surprise you.
“People are actually having babies at a slowing rate compared to the generation before – the amount of new consumers coming in to market is lessening,” he observes. “The biggest (ad) spenders are having a harder time continuing to grow. They’re going to have to reach and retain their current customers. They’re going to have to reach new customers and change their brand preference.”
Neuhauser says that’s what the scale and reach of TV excels at. So why throw the baby out with the bath water?
Programming Note: He will be a speaker at the Beet.TV executive retreat next week in Florida.
]]>“There’s a lot of talk about addressable TV. The market is trying to look for what is real,” comments digital ad group 4C Insights‘ CEO Lance Neuhauser, whose company offers social media insight in to the buying of TV ads.
“We finally now have the infrastructure and the data available to actually deliver on the promise of addressable TV – one ad going to a specific household.
“That brings about a whole new series of questions – ‘Who should I be putting my message in front of and why?’ ‘How can I measure whether that ad was effective?’ We plan to play aggressively in the delivery portion of this.”
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
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The Chicago-based company is helping advertisers better understand how to target users of social networks by comprehending their response to brands, interests and media behaviour.
“We look at over 1.5 billion user profiles, 250,000 interests, 50,000 brands and 6,000 TV programs on a regular basis, and we map the connections between all of those entities, which is literally trillions of nodes’ worth of data,” CEO Lance Neuhauser tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
He says brands don’t want to target consumers based on reach and demographic any more, because the media landscape has become so fragmented and unpredictable.
“We also start to ingest set-top box data in which we’re looking at millions of households’ second-by-second data, every single button that’s pressed on the remote control,” he adds.
“We overlay over 29 different categories of information so we can see who’s tuned in to what program, whether they’re fast-forwarding through commercials and those that are viewing commercials, what their persona is.
“We also ad occurrence information that spans over 60 countries, over 2,000 channels, 600,000 commercials a day.”
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.
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“We’re playing aggressively in the decisioning process for addressable TV and we’re hoping to streamline some of the creative decisioning,” 4C CEO Lance Neuhauser tells Beet.TV in this video interview, recorded in Chicago earlier this month.
Teletrax was first started as a TV watermarking and monitoring service by Medialink Worldwide in 2002. Six years later, it was acquired by Philips’s Content Identification unit, which later spun out as Civolution.
As Civolution, the company’s main technology play has been to trigger ads on social media platforms in sync with live TV broadcasts, maximising advertiser reach. The technology was deployed to target ads against in-game Superbowl plays back in January.
Civolution sold off its audience measurement and watermarking tech to Kantar last fall, reverting to use the Teletrax brand to focus on the TV-synced ads. Social ad click-throughs increase when delivered along with related TV broadcasts, the company says. It is this which 4C Insight is acquiring.
Chicago-based 4C already offers a measurement and planning platform that lets ad buyers target social media users by interests, TV programs and languages.
In its announcement, it says: “By combining data from set-top boxes, ad scheduling, and TV ad occurrences, 4C can address millions of households and provide TV verification for advertisers, agencies, broadcasters, and operators.”
4C is getting an Eindhoven, Netherlands-based company that will expand its feature set and geographic footprint, as the industry begins to apply online ad targeting techniques to TV, even combining the two.
To make the purchase, 4C raised further investment led by Jump Partners. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Civolution CEO Alex Terpstra, who joins 4C as EMEA managing director, says: “Teletrax clients will soon enjoy 4C’s unique ability to unlock the power of social connections in driving advertising effectiveness, while 4C’s clients gain access to our real-time TV analytics and TV synced advertising offerings. It truly is a win-win for everyone involved.”
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