Here’s our story.
RETURN2SENDER was founded in ‘dotcom’ London in 2001 by Donald Douglas & Mark Mulhern who both left their jobs in advertising to help set up ContactDetails.com (a mobile version of LinkedIn).
There was a feature in the ContactDetails platform which enabled users to publish their status updates and retrieve contact information via SMS (back then privacy fears meant no one wanted to share contact information online let alone on their mobiles.)
Anyway, this ‘texting in and getting something back’ provided the idea to create a company that would provide a direct response service which would help advertisers make their outdoor advertising work harder.
We called ourselves RTN2SNDR (now RETURN2SENDER) because when we started off we believed that any mobile communication would need to ‘user initiated’ and building a mobile strategy would be all about the ‘value exchange’ of getting consumers to make the first move on the assumption that there would be something of value in return. Implicit in this, is of course a ‘return’ to our clients as well.
We also believed that the push model of DM or the interruption model of TV would never apply to ‘personal’ mobile.
It was a simple idea, but we were the first to spot it and almost ten years on we’ve continued to innovate and built a mobile agency around understanding how to move people on the move with integrated ideas that provide consumer and advertiser ‘return’.
We got stuck with the whole Elvis thing but at least you won’t forget our name!