Adelphic, The Mobile Ad Startup From Quattro, iAd Alums, Poaches 4Info’s Colwell As CRO

Adelphic Mobile, a Boston-based mobile advertising startup from alums of Quattro, the company that Apple acquired and turned into iAd, has just poached a new chief revenue officer.

The company just picked up advertising exec Ray Colwell from SMS ad network 4Info. Before working at 4Info, Colwell was the vice president of national and direct sales at display ad network Collective, which was behind mobile ad campaigns for brands like Discovery, Bank of America, Procter & Gamble and Ford. Before that, he was previously vice president of mobile video ad network Transpera, which was recently acquired by Tremor Media. He was also senior vice president of Third Screen Media, which was bought by AOL.

Adelphic uses predictive modeling to determine how an audience is likely divided between several different demographics, and to target ads based on those predictions. Its targeting technology systematically tries to predict campaign performance in real-time so that ads are better targeted too.

Improving mobile ad targeting is a big deal because there is such a huge gap between ad rates on mobile devices and on the desktop web. In a slide from one of her famous data dumps two weeks ago, Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker said that the effective cost per one thousand impressions (or eCPM), was 75 cents on mobile compared to $3.50 on the desktop web. If this problem can’t be solved over the next few years, it could make a lot of advertising supported businesses basically unviable on mobile platforms. Even companies like Google and Facebook are vexed by this issue.

Adelphic was started two years ago and has raised $2 million in seed funding from investors including Matrix Partners.