Project Description

A strategic and creative marketing solutions agency specializing in mobile product development — partnering with publishers, brands, and media agencies to turn marketing budgets into breakthrough apps.

Brand Context

In 2009, the App Store was barely a year old. The iPhone had fewer than 100,000 apps. Publishers, studios, and brands were beginning to ask a question no one had a real answer to: what does a story, a product, or a daily ritual become on a phone?

Hooray — hooraysociety.com — was our answer. Not a dev shop and not a studio in the traditional sense, but a strategic and creative marketing solutions agency built around a single conviction: the next great creative form wasn’t a campaign, a microsite, or a pre-roll. It was an app. We partnered with publishers, brands, and media agencies to shift marketing dollars out of one-off executions and into products that connected directly with a specific audience.

The Challenge

How do you convince brands and publishers to redeploy marketing budgets into mobile products — when the entire agency category was still selling them campaigns?

Strategic Insight

The industry was treating mobile as a distribution channel. We treated it as a medium — and, more importantly, as a product discipline.

Our working belief was simple: the phone was the most intimate piece of creative real estate a brand could ever occupy. You didn’t need to interrupt someone there. You could earn a spot on their home screen if you built something worth opening tomorrow. That reframed the role of marketing money — from buying attention to building utility — and it reframed our role from agency to product partner.

Creative Execution

Hooray operated as a lean product team spanning strategy, design, engineering, and QA. We defined product requirements with clients, shaped positioning, managed the release roadmap, and worked directly with client marketing and PR teams on launch.

The slate included:

  • Dark Prophecy Interactive — the iPad companion to Anthony Zuiker’s digi-novel with CSI creator Anthony Zuiker. Featured by Apple as a top grossing paid app in the Book category, one of the landmark early examples of a publisher-backed narrative product on iOS.

  • Language Master — a mobile-first approach to language learning built for how people actually use their phones.

  • Birthday Cake — a playful, ritual-driven app designed to live inside a moment people already wanted to celebrate. Featured on a Modern Family episode.

  • Top Dog — an entertainment-led app built for everyday fun.

  • A broader slate of original apps across entertainment, education, and lifestyle categories.

Inside Hooray, we also incubated MoPix, which we later spun off as its own business to focus on premium film distribution on mobile.

Results

  • Three Top 10 mobile apps launched during the formative years of the App Store.

  • Dark Prophecy Interactive featured by Apple as a top grossing paid app in the Book category.

  • MoPix incubated and spun off from inside Hooray as a standalone company.

  • A repeatable model for turning marketing budgets into product-led brand experiences, proving a thesis the agency world would take another decade to fully accept.

Reflection

Hooray was a bet that the best thing a brand could do with a marketing dollar was build something useful. That was a hard sell in 2009 — and it would still be a hard sell today. But every time the work landed, the lesson was the same: attention is rented, and products are owned. If you want a relationship with an audience, build something they choose to open. The rest of a career spent in strategy is, in some way, still arguing that point.

Founder · 2009–2012