The Saaspocalypse is here, as you’ve probably heard, as AI begins to compress the application layer of marketing software.
There’s a reality beneath the hype. Many of the features that once differentiated platforms are becoming easier to replicate. Dashboards can be generated, reports can be summarized, workflows can be automated, all instantly and with little more than a conversational prompt.
As that layer loses its differentiation, attention has swung to what lies beneath it, namely, the signal economy.
Modern marketing already runs on signals that shape how budgets move, how campaigns optimize, and how automated systems make decisions. As more of that work shifts to AI, the infrastructure behind the interface becomes more important than the interface itself.
For brands, the question is no longer whether signals matter. It is what signals they control, how reliable those signals are, and whether they can trust them at scale.
Today, the signals themselves are becoming a strategic asset. And for brands, the most valuable signals increasingly originate in owned environments where customer behavior can be observed directly.
Understanding how those signals are generated, structured, and used is quickly becoming the central challenge of modern marketing.
Signals are not commodities
Not all signals hold the same value.
The value of a signal depends on where it comes from and how it is processed. A conversion event captured through a direct integration with a platform, normalized through a consistent taxonomy, filtered for fraud, reconciled across devices, and tied to a persistent identity framework carries far more value than a loosely inferred or scraped data point.
Signal quality depends on provenance and governance, as well as on the processes applied to validate and structure the data. Fraud filtering, identity resolution, event normalization, and consistent measurement frameworks all shape the reliability of the signals that marketing systems rely on.
Relationships across the ecosystem also matter. Some of the most valuable signals originate from platforms that operate at scale and maintain tightly controlled integrations with a limited set of trusted partners. These signals carry a level of reliability that cannot be replicated through indirect or synthetic data sources.
As marketing systems become more automated, signal quality becomes even more important. AI-driven bidding, budget allocation, and campaign optimization all rely on the signals they receive. When signals are weak, automation amplifies the error. When signals are strong, automation amplifies the advantage.
The app as a signal environment
While many signals originate across platforms, some of the strongest signals available to a brand come from environments it directly controls.
For many companies, that environment is the app. Historically, brands relied heavily on the website as the primary channel for gathering first-party data. Privacy regulations and the decline of third-party cookies reinforced that strategy. But traffic patterns are shifting. A growing share of engagement now occurs within apps rather than on the open web.
Apps concentrate authenticated users, persistent engagement, and transactional behavior in a controlled environment. They capture signals throughout the customer lifecycle, from acquisition and onboarding to product interactions, purchase behavior, retention, and re-engagement.
That makes the app uniquely valuable in the signal economy.
The app is often evaluated like a marketing channel, measured primarily by the revenue it generates directly or the installs it produces.
That framing understates its strategic role. The app’s real value lies in the signals it generates.
Because those signals are tied to authenticated users and observable behavior, they provide a clear view of how customers interact with a brand. These signals strengthen attribution models, improve audience targeting, inform creative optimization, and provide AI-driven marketing systems with more reliable inputs.
In this sense, the app becomes one of the most powerful environments where brands can generate high-quality signals that feed the broader marketing ecosystem.
Marketing signals are omnichannel
For brands, the signal economy ultimately extends far beyond any single environment.
Many of the signals that matter originate across the broader marketing ecosystem. Advertising activity on platforms such as Meta, Google, TikTok, retail media networks, and connected television environments generates behavioral signals about how customers interact with campaigns. Media exposure produces engagement signals. Conversions produce outcome signals.
Together, these signals describe how marketing investments influence customer behavior.
These signals are already used to optimize campaigns and allocate budget. But their value extends beyond individual campaigns. Structured correctly, they provide a system-level view of how the entire marketing engine is performing.
Measurement infrastructure plays a critical role here. Measurement partners connect the platforms where marketing activity occurs and translate raw events into comparable outputs such as attribution, incrementality, and return on investment.
Signals generated in owned environments, including apps, become part of this broader system as well. When structured through measurement infrastructure, these signals help brands connect customer behavior across platforms, channels, and devices.
For many brands, the app becomes the defensible nucleus of that signal system. It is where authenticated customer behavior is most visible and where the strongest first-party signals can be generated consistently.
Those signals do not stay inside the app. When structured and connected through measurement infrastructure, they extend outward across the entire marketing ecosystem, informing campaigns on every platform and helping brands understand how customers move across channels.
Those outputs allow brands to see how their investments work together across channels rather than in isolation.
The same signals used to optimize campaigns today are also becoming the inputs that guide automated marketing systems tomorrow.
As AI becomes more embedded in marketing operations, the quality of those underlying signals will increasingly determine how effective those systems are.
Brands that generate strong, reliable signals at their core, particularly within their owned app environments, will have the clearest foundation for AI-driven optimization across their omnichannel marketing systems.
In the signal economy, the brands that win will be those that build their signal strength at the center and extend it across the full customer journey.
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Ran Avrahamy is AppsFlyer’s CMO, a role he’s served in since joining the company in 2014, leading a team of global marketers across AppsFlyer’s offices in more than 20 countries. Before joining AppsFlyer, Ran co-founded Scringo, empowering native apps with social and communication capabilities.