4C Insights, a data science company, announced a suite of TV ad planning, buying and measurement tools called 4C TV. Collectively, the tools are meant to give advertisers and agencies the ability to efficiently zero in on their most-desired audiences by leveraging multiple data sets.  At the Advanced Advertising conference in NYC, chief product officer Anupam Gupta gave me a short demo illustrating how a buyer can use a simple workflow to quickly create a targeted TV media plan using 4C TV.

At the highest level, 4C TV gives the buyer the ability to create a custom audience, specify the target number of impressions and overall budget. Audience composition goes beyond Nielsen’s age and gender data, using the “4C Insights Affinity Graph” which combines historical TV airings, real-time TV monitoring, household-level viewing and social media engagement to form a comprehensive profile of users’ media behaviors.

4C monitors over 2,100 channels in 76 countries via its 2015 acquisition of Teletrax. 4C’s self-service platform is already used to place $1 billion of ad spending per year on top social networks. Blending TV and social insights is the foundation for 4C TV’s mapping of consumer behaviors.

Once the campaign’s parameters were entered, it took just a couple of minutes for a plan to be developed and returned. The plan detailed placements across multiple TV networks, networks, GRPs, etc. Then the plan could be further tweaked by adjusting any of the inputs. A key value is distributing the campaign across other dayparts than primetime where target audiences can be reached cost-effectively.

Going into this year’s upfront, a big part of the headlines are once again TV networks giving advertisers greater ability to use data to target audiences. Last week’s announcement of OpenAP by Fox, Turner and Viacom, plus NBCUniversal’s commitment of a $1 billion of inventory for data-enabled ads are indicative of how networks are diving deeper into data. They’re being driven by media buyers seeking greater audience targeting on top of the competitive pressure that Google and Facebook, with their massive reach and extensive user data, are exerting.

In this context, 4C TV looks like a valuable tool for buyers to use TV and social data, plus consumer behavior profiles, to plan TV campaigns across networks.