aid: 4c
name: 4C
description: >-
  4C — legally 4C Insights, Inc. — was a Chicago-based marketing intelligence and advertising
  technology company founded in 2011 by Northwestern University professor Alok Choudhary,
  building on his research into large-scale data mining and social signal. Its Scope "closed
  ecosystems platform" let brands, agencies and media companies discover cross-channel audience
  insights, plan and execute paid campaigns inside walled-garden environments — Facebook,
  Instagram, X/Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest and connected TV — and measure the results
  in one self-service tool, with data delivery out to third-party systems by API, email, SFTP or
  web query. The company raised roughly $26 million through a Series C, grew to about 160 people
  and ran offices in Chicago, New York, Seattle and Singapore. Mediaocean announced its
  acquisition of 4C in July 2020 (reported at approximately $150 million) and folded the product
  into Flashtalking by Mediaocean; after Mediaocean's later combination with Innovid, the 4C
  social-advertising surface now lives inside Innovid's social ads management product. 4C never
  operated a public developer program: it consumed the advertising APIs of the closed ecosystems
  it served rather than publishing one of its own, and today the 4cinsights.com domain serves no
  HTTPS listener and blanket-301s every path to the acquirer's site. This profile is retained as
  a historical record; there is no 4C API surface to enrich.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/4c/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: harvest:secondary-market
x-source-url: https://forgeglobal.com/4c_stock/
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: defunct-no-api-surface
x-status: defunct
x-acquired-by: mediaocean
x-acquired-date: '2020-07-29'
x-domain-status: redirect
x-domain-note: >-
  4cinsights.com is still registered (AWS Route 53 nameservers) but has no HTTPS listener —
  TLS connect to 443 times out on both the apex and www. Port 80 answers and blanket-301s
  every path, including /openapi.json, /apis.json and every /.well-known/ path, to
  http://flashtalking.com/social, which lands on
  https://www.innovid.com/platform/social-ads-management. The redirect target belongs to
  Innovid/Mediaocean, so no artifact behind it is credited to 4C.
x-api-posture: no-product-api
x-api-posture-basis: observed
x-api-posture-note: >-
  No developer portal, documentation, machine-readable contract, hosted MCP server, agent card,
  first-party SDK or registry package was found for 4C on any host the record knows. npm search
  for "4cinsights" returns 0 packages, PyPI 404s, and github.com/4cinsights is a 404 — the only
  GitHub matches are two unaffiliated third-party test-framework repos.
specificationVersion: '0.20'
created: '2026-09-05'
modified: '2026-09-05'
tags:
- Company
- Defunct
- Acquired
- Advertising
- Marketing
- Analytics
- Social-Media
- Television
- Audience Intelligence
- AdTech
tags_raw:
- Company
- Defunct
- Acquired
- Advertising
- Marketing
- Analytics
- Social Media
- Television
- Audience Intelligence
- Ad Tech
apis: []
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
common:
- type: Acquirer
  name: Mediaocean — 4C acquisition announcement (2020)
  url: https://www.mediaocean.com/4C-acquisition
- type: ParentCompany
  name: Mediaocean
  url: https://www.mediaocean.com/
- type: LinkedIn
  name: 4C Insights (part of Flashtalking by Mediaocean)
  url: https://www.linkedin.com/company/4c-insights
- type: DomainSecurity
  name: Domain security posture for 4cinsights.com
  url: security/4c-domain-security.yml
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-09-05'
  status: minimal
  artifacts_added: 2
  pass: local-v3
x-coverage:
  state: none
  reason: defunct
  detail: >-
    4C Insights was acquired by Mediaocean in July 2020 and its brand fully absorbed —
    4cinsights.com now serves no HTTPS listener at all and blanket-301s every path over
    port 80, including /openapi.json, /apis.json and all eleven /.well-known/ paths, to
    http://flashtalking.com/social, which lands on Innovid's social ads management page.
  evidence:
  - url: http://4cinsights.com/openapi.json
    status: 301
  - url: https://4cinsights.com/
    status: 0
  - url: http://4cinsights.com/.well-known/agent-card.json
    status: 301
  - url: https://api.github.com/orgs/4cinsights
    status: 404
  - url: https://pypi.org/pypi/4cinsights/json
    status: 404
  - url: https://www.mediaocean.com/4C-acquisition
    status: 200
  checked: '2026-09-05'