Adelphic, one of a handful of companies helping brands and publishers identify audiences across devices, has scored a CEO from agency land.
Michael Collins was the chief executive at WPP-owned mobile agency Joule, which he built from scratch in 2007 into a global mobile-centric marketing agency with outposts in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Collins will help two-year-old Adelphic bring its publisher- and advertiser-facing technology to market. On the supply side, the company works with its publisher partners to profile their traffic and, in the words of cofounder Jennifer Lum, “make each user and ad request much more specific and descriptive by appending data to them to open up many more targeting possibilities.”
Among its rivals are Drawbridge, Tapad and AdTruth.
From the marketer perspective, Collins says he tested many “data-enhanced” mobile ad products at Joule and believes Adelphic is one of the few to drive significant performance improvements.
“What got me interested first in the company is they seem to be the first ones who have been able to crack the code to such a degree that they can identify users [cross-device],” Collins said.
Adelphic was founded by executives of Quattro Wireless, which was acquired by Apple in 2010 and used as the foundation for the iAd mobile ad network.
Collins joins Adelphic at a time when many agency execs find the lure of the platform/vendor side irresistible. Among the bright agency lights to follow that path are Matt Spiegel, former CEO at OMG Digital, who arrived at MediaMath by way of Tap.me; Publicis/VivaKi execs David Kenny and Curt Hecht (Weather.com); and Publicis Modem CEO Jean-Philippe Maheu (Bluefin Labs/Twitter).
