Alok Choudhary, Algorithms for Integrated Marketing
Most of the research conducted over the decades by Alok Choudhary, PhD, has focused on how data science and algorithms apply to various scientific fields, ranging from climate understanding to epidemic detection.
But when social media came into being, the Henry and Isabelle Dever Professor in Northwestern’s electrical and computer engineering department at the McCormick School of Engineering channeled his efforts toward developing data science algorithms to analyzing usage data for various applications, including how to optimize marketing and advertising.
The insights Choudhary gained in doing preliminary research along those lines led him to start a company providing such algorithmic services to brands that wanted to optimize and measure social media marketing campaigns. In 2011, he co-founded and served as chairman and chief scientist of a company called VoxSup that provided this platform, starting with Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and others.
A couple of years later, one of Choudhary’s founding collaborators and angel investors in Voxsup happened to be sitting on a flight next to Lance Neuhauser, a former ad agency executive, who became very excited at the concept of VoxSup and expressed an interest in becoming involved. The partners raised initial venture funding from Jump Capital to grow the company, Neuhauser became CEO, and they rebranded VoxSup to 4C Insights.
The “4C” is partly based on Neuhauser’s seat on that fateful airplane flight. It’s also easier to remember than VoxSup, Choudhary noted, and it’s a play on the word “foresight.”
Over the next several years, 4C expanded its reach into other forms of media, including television and video, bringing together omnichannel optimization of advertising and marketing campaigns and providing the highest and best game plan for success, said Choudhary, who also has an appointment at the Kellogg School of Management. The Scope platform they created channeled more than $2 billion in annualized advertising spend, and the Chicago-based company grew to more than 200 employees with offices in Europe and Asia.
“Consumers don’t consume based on channels,” he pointed out. “They are looking for products and services regardless of the channels they’re in. In the past, [marketers] were in silos that were inefficient, both in terms of time and money, and in not being able to use the data across all these channels. We came up with techniques that allowed marketing across all these channels, as if they were one, giant marketing space including so-called walled-gardens such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.”
The success of 4C and its product, Scope, along with other products the company developed, garnered the interest of New York-based Mediaocean, a company that processes $150 billion in ad purchases each year. Mediaocean in July 2020 announced the purchase of 4C for nearly $200 million, and its advertising clients are now able to avail themselves of the platform. Choudhary is now a board member and consultant to Mediaocean.
“In the business world, there are always opportunities,” he stated. “When you have a startup, you eventually look for an exit opportunity, and also an opportunity to perhaps grow the company as part of a larger company.” The possibilities can include raising significantly more money from financiers or venture capital to scale up, or rolling out an initial public offering, he adds, but the acquisition offer came at the right time and provided a chance to offer the platform to a much larger pool of customers.
Choudhary continues his research in data mining and machine learning. He participates in multiple projects and serves on the Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Boards AI working group, exploring questions around scaling artificial intelligence and machine learning on supercomputers. His current research continues to be in large-scale AI/ML. “I haven’t had enough bandwidth to think about something new when it comes to commercialization,” he said.
Choudhary hopes the platform he created continues to grow as part of Mediaocean. “The whole idea is to be a leader in omnichannel,” he added. “Clearly, there is excitement in the new, combined company, to grow this to the next level. I hope it grows to a much larger scale.”