Quattro Wireless

» see quattrowireless.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Quattro Wireless was founded in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2006 by Andy Miller and Lars Albright, and it chose the opposite end of the market from AdMob. AdMob sold volume, with cheap inventory and a self-serve console behind it. Quattro sold premium placements to brand advertisers who wanted their campaign to look like it had been designed by somebody, on publishers who could be named in a pitch deck. In the mobile web of 2006, when a banner on a phone meant a 120 pixel wide GIF on a WAP page, this was a defensible position and a small business.

Then the phone changed and the position got valuable. By late 2009 Google was buying AdMob for $750 million and Apple had decided it needed a mobile advertising business of its own, having lost that auction. Quattro was the other serious independent left standing. Apple's acquisition was confirmed at the start of January 2010 at $275 million in cash, and Miller walked into Cupertino as vice president of mobile advertising reporting directly to Steve Jobs.

On 8 April 2010 Jobs unveiled iAd at the iPhone OS 4 preview, and the pitch was that mobile ads were bad because tapping one threw you out of the app. iAd would render the ad inside the app instead, full screen, with Apple's own team helping build the creative. Minimum buy one million dollars, with Apple keeping 40 percent. The platform went live on 1 July 2010. Quattro's engineers had built it and Quattro's salespeople were selling it, which left the original network as an awkward leftover: it served Android and BlackBerry handsets, and Apple had no interest in selling advertising onto those.

The notice went out on 19 August 2010. Miller emailed developers and advertisers, and the Quattro site posted the plain version: no new campaigns on the Quattro Wireless Network, existing campaigns winding down, and "as of September 30, we will support ads exclusively for the iAd network". Under nine months after the purchase was confirmed, the thing Apple had paid $275 million for was switched off, having delivered exactly what Apple bought it for.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the $50 million meeting ~

Miller told this story publicly years later. The two sides had agreed on $325 million. At the final meeting Jobs reopened the price, and when Miller pushed back, Jobs pointed out that Apple could simply decide ads would not run on iPhones at all, which would leave Quattro selling into a market without the handset that mattered. Miller took $275 million. The same visit produced the other half of the story: he walked out of Jobs's office carrying a laptop that turned out to be Jobs's own machine, and had to arrange its return afterward.

~ the wind-down notice ~

Publishers reading that August email were being told something fairly brutal in polite language. Their inventory had just lost one of the two premium buyers in mobile, and the replacement did not want them, because the replacement only bought iOS. Advertisers lost the ability to run one campaign across every smartphone platform from a single premium network. iAd's early reviews were mixed in a specific way: the ads themselves tested well, and the campaigns were slow to get approved and launched.

~ what the founders did next ~

Miller ran iAd until late 2011, then left Apple for Highland Capital Partners, where he was a partner through 2014. Albright led iAd business development and then quit in 2011 to found SessionM, a mobile loyalty and rewards platform that raised a $20 million Series B in 2012 and was eventually bought by Mastercard. iAd itself was shut down in 2016, six years after the network that was cleared out of its way.

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