Hooray — A Strategic Creative Agency for the First Era of Mobile

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

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.

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. Featured by Apple as a top grossing paid app in the Book category.
• 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.

• 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.