ASO Company of the Year
Voted by the industry, for a year’s body of work, weighted toward the biggest accounts. A fair signal of competence at scale. It says nothing about who is assigned to an account your size.
Trophies are not staffingASO agency review · September 2026
ConsultMyApp review: award-winning, and that is the problem. Avoid buying the trophy.
ConsultMyApp was crowned ASO Company of the Year at the 2023 App Growth Awards and won a campaign award for its Macy’s work in 2024. Those are real achievements. They are also the centrepiece of the pitch, and a pitch built on awards is a pitch built on other people’s budgets. Read this before you assume the trophy transfers to your app.
Thinking about hiring ConsultMyApp? Avoid. Let me explain what an award actually tells you.
Gabriel Machuret · September 2026ConsultMyApp, or CMA as they style it, is a London agency founded in 2016 by Mike Rhodes, and it is one of the more decorated names in European app marketing. ASO Company of the Year in 2023. App Marketing Campaign of the Year in 2024 for work with Macy’s. I mention these first because they will mention them first, and because I want to explain why they should carry less weight in your decision than they carry in the sales deck.
Here is how agency awards work. The agency chooses a campaign, usually its best-funded one, writes the entry, pays the fee, and is judged by a panel drawn from the same industry. The campaign that wins is the one with the biggest budget, the most famous brand and the most dramatic before-and-after. That is not cynicism. It is the format. A Macy’s campaign has a Macy’s budget behind it. Your app, with respect, does not. The trophy proves CMA can do excellent work when the conditions are excellent. It does not tell you what happens when the conditions are yours.
Now consider what your retainer funds. Awards are a marketing programme, and marketing programmes cost money: entry fees, case study production, the senior time spent writing submissions and attending ceremonies. That is part of the overhead spread across every client. So is the sales team that converts the award into the next pitch. So is the account layer that keeps you informed. Around a quarter of what you pay reaches the person actually rewriting your keyword field. The rest is the machine that makes the agency look like the safe choice.
There is also the full-service question. CMA sells ASO alongside paid acquisition, CRM, creative and business intelligence. That breadth is genuinely useful for a retailer with a large app and many teams. For a single app that needs its store presence fixed, it is a menu of reasons for the retainer to grow. The second quarter of an agency relationship is when the cross-sell conversation starts, and it starts because the agency’s business model requires it to.
Compare that with hiring one consultant. No awards programme to fund, no sales team, no account layer. You talk to the person doing the work. The scope is written down: what gets rewritten, what gets tested, when it ships, what it costs. When it ends, you own the keyword map, the test log and the reasoning, and your own team runs the next round. The fee is a fraction of a year’s retainer, and none of it is spent making anyone look good at a ceremony.
In fairness: if you are a large retailer or consumer brand that wants ASO, paid, CRM and creative from one experienced London team, CMA is a serious option and the awards are evidence they can deliver at that scale. If you are here because your listing is underperforming and you want it fixed by someone whose only incentive is that it works, send me their proposal and I will show you what the ASO line costs on its own.
02 — What the trophy cabinet says vs what your listing gets
Three things to translate before you signCampaign of the Year
One campaign, one famous brand, one large budget. The before-and-after was spectacular because the inputs were. Ask for a case study from an app your size with your budget.
Ask for your weight classFull-funnel partner
ASO, UA, CRM, creative and BI under one roof. Each is a team, each team needs revenue, and your retainer is the door they will knock on in quarter two.
Full-funnel is the upsell03 — Where an award-winning agency’s retainer actually goes
Typical agency economics · illustrative, not their books$84,000a year at a typical $7,000/month retainer$62,160of it never touches your app store listing
17%Awards, PR & new business
20%Account management
20%Multi-discipline overhead
17%London office & margin
26%Senior ASO work on your app
Awards, PR & new business. Entry fees, case studies, ceremonies, and the sales team that turns trophies into pitches.
Account management. The layer that runs your meetings, writes the recap, and manages the cross-sell.
Multi-discipline overhead. Paid, CRM, creative and BI teams all need to be kept busy. Every retainer helps.
London office & margin. Rent, tools, and the owners’ return.
Senior ASO work on your app. The part you thought you were buying. About a quarter.
04 — Red flags in an award-winning proposal
If you see three, send it to me- The case studies are all brands ten times your size
- A ‘strategic audit’ month billed at full retainer before any change ships
- CRM or paid services appearing in an ASO proposal you did not ask for
- The award-winning team is not the team named on your account
- Dashboards and reporting counted as deliverables
- A minimum term longer than the stores take to respond to one change
05 — ConsultMyApp vs one consultant
Same goal: more installs from searchConsultMyAppGabriel, direct
The pitchAwards, famous campaigns, full-funnel teamA rewrite, a test plan, a handover
Who does the workAn ASO strategist on a roster, via an account managerGabriel, on every deliverable
ContractMonthly retainerFixed scope, fixed fee
12-month cost≈ $84,000 at a typical $7k/mo$9,500, one engagement
Also for salePaid UA, CRM, creative, BINothing. One category, one strategy.
ReportingMonthly deck, dashboardsA changelog: what shipped, what it did
When it endsRenewal conversationYour team runs ASO without me
06 — Fair play — what ConsultMyApp genuinely does well
Credit where it is due- The awards were earned; they can clearly deliver at enterprise scale
- Genuine breadth if you need ASO, paid and CRM from one London team
- A founder who is still visibly involved in the industry
07 — Should you avoid ConsultMyApp?
Honest answer: depends who you areAvoid if
You are choosing them because of the awardsYour ASO budget is under $50k a yearYou need one listing fixed, not a full-funnel programmeYou want your own team to learn the workHire them if
You are a large retailer or consumer brand with the budget behind their best case studiesYou want ASO, paid, CRM and creative from one contractProcurement needs an agency with public recognition07 — Before you sign
Send me
CMA’s
proposal.
I will read it without the trophies, tell you what would actually ship in month one, and quote the ASO work as a fixed fee. If you genuinely need the full-funnel team, I will say so.
08 — Objections
“ASO Company of the Year has to mean something.” +
It means the industry rates them, and it means their biggest accounts got excellent results. Ask on the call which of those accounts the team on your proposal actually worked on.
“Isn’t a full-funnel agency more efficient?” +
Efficient for the agency. Every added service is revenue without a new pitch. If you only need the listing fixed, buy only that.
“Can one consultant match an award-winning team?” +
On a Macy’s-sized campaign, no. On rewriting one listing, testing the creative and training your team, one experienced person is exactly what the job needs.
“Is this review biased?” +
Yes. I compete for the same ASO work. That is why the criticism is about how awards and full-service economics shape a retainer, not about anyone’s competence, and why the ‘hire them if’ list is real.
CMA quoted you? Same listing work, no ceremony.Send their proposal