A history of app marketing, as told by a founder who was there before day one

Humans have always sought ways to communicate at a distance. Even when all we had was our voiceboxes and the mountains, we bounced echoes off the rocks to inform and entertain one another. This technique, most commonly known as yodelling, is as old as our species, and it’s why I named our company Yodel Mobile. We may only be 18 years old, but we share that ancient drive to connect that inspired our ancestors to sing with the mountains.

Yodel Mobile shares its birthday year with another epochal development in the history of communications: the launch of the iPhone. This is no coincidence. Yodel was founded to help brands and developers market and monetise their software in the primordial mobile ecosystem, and both ourselves and Apple recognised that we were on the precipice of both a world-changing technological advancement and a brand-new economy.

Glimmers of potential in the unproven pre-app mobile market

Now, this might come as a surprise to anyone who’s grown up in the post-iPhone world, but our belief in the potential of mobile software was met with widespread scepticism at the time. At the time, mobiles were for calls and texts with some rudimentary internet access. Any experience beyond that was delivered through web portals accessed clumsily through your classic Nokia phone keypad. Given the lay of the land, scepticism wasn’t an irrational response.

When I was still putting the pieces together for what would eventually become Yodel Mobile, I would ask agencies and other digital contacts whether they would market mobile experiences, and the unanimous response was a flat ‘No.’

But I wasn’t alone. My research into the emerging mobile ecosystem took me to Australia’s only industry event at the time, a mobile payment forum with an audience of around 20 people. It doesn’t get much more ground-floor than that, but it was enough to convince me that there would be a need for a specialist agency focused on helping brands capitalise on this new channel.

I headed back to the office at Monkey Communications, my first agency launch, and sat down with our finance director Mike McLaughlin to share my thoughts. He was sold. Mike came on board as Yodel Mobile’s co-founder and a new company was born into an economy that didn’t exist yet. Then, a year later, Apple launched the App Store and the rest, as they say, is history.

Building a discipline that didn’t exist with tech that wasn’t invented

The App Store and the Android Market (the predecessor to Google Play) provided the first centralised distribution channels for mobile apps. This gave brands and developers a way to get their apps into the hands of consumers, but little else. The early days were a real Wild West: we were buying banner inventory directly from mobile network operators and whether or not they worked was a matter of trust because there were no measurement or attribution tools.

We were learning on the fly and passing our patchwork knowledge onto our clients. The earliest apps were mostly novelties, but it didn’t take long for publishers, retailers, travel companies, and banks to realise that the growing smartphone consumer base responded enthusiastically to the convenience of a self-contained bit of software in their pocket.

Yodel Mobile grew in tandem with the app market, from two people to three, to four, to five. Those earliest hires were nerve wracking. There were so few of us that one wrong addition could sink the ship, and the mobile market was so small that the talent pool was a pond. Luckily, each addition proved to be a pillar for our success, and our very gradual and deliberate growth meant our scale never outpaced our capabilities or the sector we served.

It didn’t take long for the business world to move past its scepticism. There was an audience, there was distribution, there were brands, but was there money to be made? The attitude back then was very ‘build it and they will come.’ Success was measured in app installs, but scale does not equal sustainability.

Our early business was focused on helping brands get audiences in the door, our second phase was focused on keeping them there. We developed solutions to help brands track engagement, retention, and customer lifetime value, which have remained our core offering ever since. This is standard practice now, but only because people put the work in to build this practice up from nothing, and we’re proud to have been foundational in its development.

More pieces of today’s mature app market emerged piece by piece. The advent of measurement and attribution technology meant app marketing performance could be tracked, benchmarked, and refined. The explosive growth of social media provided direct app-to-app discovery at enormous scale. QR codes provided a link between the physical and digital, turning the real world into another acquisition channel.

Apple gave with one hand, and it took with the other. App Tracking Transparency (ATT) severed the ability to measure and attribute performance at an individual level, forcing the sector to pivot towards broader measurement frameworks. After the initial pain, the change proved to be positive: raw performance optimisation gave way to a more nuanced approach to acquisition, where creative quality took the front seat in driving campaign success.

AI has put all of us back on the ground floor of change

There’s more to my surge of nostalgia for the early days of the app market than Yodel Mobile being old enough to buy a drink. We are once again on the precipice of massive change in communications, this time driven by the proliferation of AI. The same feelings from 18 years ago have resurfaced, where we are all learning as we go and educating one another to make sense of the unknown.

AI is changing every aspect of the app experience: AI platforms themselves are fast-growing acquisition channels; machine learning is amalgamating the mishmash of signals fragmented by ATT; app experiences are becoming more distinctively personalised and responsive to user needs; interfaces are transforming from being tapped to being talked to.

It’s a reminder that the only constant in technology is change. We were lucky enough to be on the ground floor of the app ecosystem, and now we’re on the ground floor of the AI ecosystem as well. Who knows how many potential floors are above us, but what I do know is that no one will build the future of apps alone, and I am just as excited to learn, share, fail, and succeed with my peers as I was 18 years ago.