Joe Martin with Rory Sutherland and Elfried Samba, recorded live at MAD//Fest

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1:18how's everybody doing no that's not good enough we're not going to start the podcast until we get the decimals up. How's everybody doing? One more time. How's everybody doing? All right. So my name is Alfred Summer. I'm the co-host of the Bottom Leg Podcast alongside Rory. I firmly believe We Should Start a Podcast is the modern day version of We Should Start a Band, right? And that's exactly how it started. Rory and I were at WPP Beach in, no, Stream a couple of years ago, we had a conversation, it lasted about an hour and a half, and we said that this should be a podcast. And then we looked at each other and said, we should start a podcast.

1:59And here we are. So without further ado, we have an amazing guest today. This is our second live episode, and we have Joe that's here with us. In true bottleneck form, we don't own the narrative of the guests, we let the guests own the narrative. So it'll be great for you to give our guests an introduction to yourself, Tickle, and some of the bottlenecks that you've been solving across your... Actually, very quick question. How many of you have heard of Tickle? Okay, this is interesting. How many of you practice digital marketing in some shape or form? Okay, right. There's a job to be done. Okay, here we go.

2:36Go on, Jordan. Yeah, thanks, Alfred. So basically, Tickle is a saveable ads infrastructure. So we enable any ad across any format to be saved for later directly into the mobile wallet, whether that's Apple or Google. That in itself creates a direct channel between the consumer and brand based on intent with 100 % human attribution. It's essentially a third state of advertising in a current advertising world where everything is binary. It's like you click or you don't click. There's no in between. So we create that third state for people who are interested, but not at that time. Okay. This fascinated me because it struck me that a very large part of digital advertising effectively has the wrong call to action.

3:27Because every single piece is measured on act now. Now, half the time you're exposed to that ad when you're trying to do something like renew your car road tax. Okay. You're in the middle of accomplishing some completely different task. And the ad is not irrelevant in terms of who it's targeted to. but it's completely irrelevant in terms of the moment at which it reaches you. And my whole career started in direct mail, which has one magical property in terms of its value, which is capability. You might get a piece of direct mail. I think the average piece of direct mail is kept in the home for about six or seven days.

4:07You deal with it at a time of your own choosing when it's relevant to you. And so we were just talking funnily enough backstage. stage, I said, about the third most irritating thing online, after cookie permissions and pop-ups that cover the button that you're trying to press, the third most irritating thing, effectively, is when someone sends you a ticket to something without an ads to wallet button, right? Because you go, what the fuck am I supposed to do with this? It's rather like those people who, when you have a conference, they send you the directions three weeks before. okay you go look i'm not rain man right i'm not going to actually memorize this shit now what i want to do is save it up to a moment when it's actually necessary now when you think about it in terms of a lot of advertisers and a lot of people who spend a lot of money on digital advertising it always struck me that the consumer packaged goods businesses were getting a raw deal because they're selling a low margin product which isn't an impulse buy which isn't bought immediately, they will always end up getting outbid for the high value inventory for people who are the opposite.

5:21High margin products that you buy immediately on impulse. Okay. And it struck me that I, and I actually asked Mark Reed the same question. I said, do you actually see many Unilever ads online? And we both said, no. And yet they spend a lot of money and our suspicion is that they're getting second-rate inventory that people like us don't see now if you change the call to action to save to later what you've done effectively is you've taken an ad that would be a good idea wrong time and you've effectively turned it into a retail ad you've turned it into retail advertising but you can explain more it's much more than just save for later, you can actually make the thing in your wallet do clever things later on.

6:07Yeah. Tell us more about that. No, exactly that. And CPG is a great example because they don't have necessarily a lot of data on who their end audience is. So one of the things that we look to do is give control back to the brands in that respect as well. So we've just run a campaign on our rails with a large CPG. and directly 21 % of the people who clicked through the ads took an action. So 21 % post-click action rate. That in itself, they were in love with. The stronger point of that is that, I mean, we talk about doing things for later. And to your point earlier about getting the address three weeks early, right?

6:52Humans innately forget stuff. So even if you screenshot an ad, which is where this all started, or you save an ad into the wallet, you're going to forget about it. So what we've built in the background is an engine that prompts people, reminds people they've saved the ad, can deliver new information, new updates. And what that's done, even with the CPG and with nappies, 54 % of the people who saved the ad over a four-week period went back to the wallet in their card, clicked out, went to site, took an action. The consumer has complete control on that. They're not being forced into anything. That is them putting their hand up in the first instance and saying, I'm interested, but I'm too busy right now.

7:34And that's how people shop. It's one of those things. And actually, you can go back to newspapers where people are clipping out ads and articles and saving them in their physical wallet for later. This is just the progression of that. And yet the industry has somehow missed this. It's extraordinary, actually, because there was tons of data. I mean, there's a very simple finding from direct marketing, which is if you sent identical creative to the same list two weeks later, you got 50 % of the initial response. So in other words, time, even if the second time was just as irrelevant as the first, still effectively accounted for a very large part of why people weren't responding.

8:14Absolutely. Now, if you make that second encounter actually relevant and consumer-selected, rather than just random, it's likely to be a lot more than 50 % and may well be 100 or even more. Yeah, this is it. And this is what we talk to brands about. And I guess this is the problem with the industry in general is that everything right now is built and engineered and optimized for the point of delivery, not for the point of decision. And there is a big difference in time and space between when somebody sees an ad and then when they actually want to take action on it. Nothing accounts for that. And that's one of the biggest things that we're trying to do is close that gap because it conforms to how people actually shop today.

8:58And just to jump in there, before Tickle, there was Snatch. What's the connection between the two? Other than the ridiculous names, Snatch was... Snatch were launched in like 2016, 17. Just to be clear, this is as Snatch as in Grab, okay? Just in case anybody's thinking we're suddenly promoting hardcore porn apps. Okay. I had good fun pitching that in the US. So basically what it was, I thought it would be hilarious if I let people steal off each other in a fun way in a digital environment. So in like 2016, we basically got a bunch of brands. We took their ads. We created an augmented reality treasure hunt, called it Snatch.

9:47and we hid ads all around the country. We let people find them, snatch them from each other. And then after six hours, basically what they're finding is a parcel. They don't know what's inside exactly. But then after six hours, it opens up, they can redeem what it is. And actually what it mostly was, was affiliate offers. But what we did, what was smart about that, and I guess that what leads to Tickle, is we asked the right question. like actually he wasn't even asking the right question it was allowing the consumer to give us the right answer which was are you interested do you want this ad so every single day in the morning people were trained or engineered to wake up they check their phone they'd probably see what parcel they had what they'd won etc but then they'd have seven new ads and if they were interested in that product, they like it.

10:43And then that ad becomes part of their game. They go out throughout the day. They find the parcel. They defend it. But what it actually does is to give you an example like Nike. I live in the US now so I have to say Nike. Basically, they might give away 10 pairs of trainers. 100 ,000 people would say I'm interested in that. That will go into the game for that day. Only 10 people win those trainers. So your 99 ,990 people don't win anything, but Nike know who they are. They have a direct route back to that consumer who has shown intent and said, I want that product. So then Nike can go back and we call it a secondary offer.

11:27And they can go back and go, well, we know you didn't win it. Here's 10 % off if you purchase in the next 24 hours, et cetera. And that is pure deterministic data coming from the platform. And that is essentially what we're looking to do or what we are doing with Tickle, but at kind of DSP scale.

12:07podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. I mean, actually, both of them are based on a similar, in a sense, a similar insight, which is what people dislike about advertising and brands is not necessarily what they are. It's how they show up. Oh, 100%. I always say that people don't hate advertising. They hate being interrupted. So if you can get an ad to not act or look and feel like an ad, people will engage with it. Because naturally, as humans, we crave new information. We want to know what our favorite brands are doing next. We always want to know if there's a good offer or a deal that we can get.

12:49But if it's just being blasted at us, every single page that we turn, we're trained to ignore it. The analogy I always use about this, about the importance of timing and context, and of course, being interested in behavioral science, we're obsessed by context, partly because the effect of context is often invisible or not properly measured, is that those moments when you've had a hard day and you're traveling home on the train and you see the person who you probably like more than almost everybody else in the whole world board the train and you're actually disappointed because you're looking forward to spending 45 minutes on your own.

13:27Do you see what I mean? You all know what that feels like. People who you really, really love, but who show up at an inopportune moment. Yes. And so I think what you're doing there, which is that actually personalization, targeting by time, in a sense, I suppose, that's one of the insights of behavioral science, which is me now and me in four hours' time are actually, in a way, more different than you and me are now. Yeah. And I think that importance... Economics doesn't understand mood. Fundamentally, it doesn't understand mood. It doesn't understand mode. It doesn't understand context. It just understands transactions and utility maximization.

14:07And actually, when you look at a huge amount of consumer purchase behavior, but also interaction, engagement, attention, one virtue which everybody missed about direct mail was that it was keepable. And one virtue everybody missed about press advertising was that it tended to appear when you were reading anyway. And so you were in the right frame of mind to consume a press ad by dint of the fact that you were reading a newspaper already. You were in the right frame of mind, in a sense, to consume a TV ad because you were sitting on a sofa watching stuff. So much online advertising. I mean, I have no financial interest in this.

14:45I'm simply an enthusiast because this approach strikes me fundamentally as courteous to the consumer. that a lot of advertising strikes me as fundamentally a discourtesy in terms of how and when it shows up and what it asks people to do. Yeah, we always talk about the fact that modern-day advertising is more obsessed with the content than it is with the context, right? Because the context actually matters, and if you can marry the two up together, that's when magic's created, right? And Gary Vaynerchuk talks about the fact that most brands should be prioritizing jabs instead of hooks, which means jab, jab, jab up front, which means give, give, give up front, and then you ask, not take.

15:25And I think a lot of the times that brands are doing, and going back to your whole statement about interrupting, is they're all going to everybody and trying to take, take, take, and not give. That was actually the point of Snatch. It was to create a value exchange between a consumer and a brand because we all know, I mean, going back to Cambridge Analytica, everybody's now fully aware that we are the product, right? we are what's getting monetized. So if consumers are more and more aware of that, the brand needs to do more to be able to give something back for the time and attention. When a brand, really all they want to know is who's interested in their product.

16:03So I guess what we try and do, or the companies that I've built, are about bridging that gap, but asking the right question. Which is even more interesting now because of AI and everything else, which personally I feel is the right answer to the wrong question. because it doesn't fix for engagement, it doesn't fix for attribution. There's still two huge gaps in the industry, and I think the industry itself is actually starting to come around to that. And that was probably my biggest takeaway from Canon, I know you guys were there as well. This year was talking more about how they can get engaged with first-party data, use that to create trust and authority and everything else.

16:42I mean, your bottleneck, to bring this back to the theme of the... I think you have an inarguably good idea. What your bottleneck will be is clients who are effectively bonused around old-fashioned and inadequate metrics. If you're being really cynical about digital advertising, it's only secondarily in the business of actually selling business growth. What it's really doing is selling self-serving metrics to junior clients in order to justify their own existence. so you know what is the relative importance in digital advertising of producing genuine lasting rewarding results and relationships versus allowing someone to produce a nice spreadsheet or a chart which shows they did six percent better this year than they did the year before and if one's being really really cynical you could say a large part of digital advertising is actually about defensive decision making it's not really about uh discovery or you know or i I mean, the most extreme case I heard was someone who was asked to turn off their retail advertising.

17:48And they said, well, why? It's getting people very successfully to buy very high margin, sorry, very high profit premium products in this category. And the person said, I know, it makes us a lot of money. Unfortunately, my bonus is paid on percentage margin, not overall profit. and we make more percentage margin selling our own brand low profit product than we do selling the premium product. So I need you to turn off this advertising for three months so that I can actually meet my target and get my bonus. Intriguingly, Greg Jackson or Octopus does not pay bonuses. And his argument is once you actually pay, once you have a formalized bonus structure, Everybody pursues narrow objectives, not broad objectives.

18:35That's the first problem. The second one is they start gaming the system. Yeah. And it always happens. Basically, metrics will always end up getting gamed. And yet, weirdly, finance people have some sort of naive faith that everything simply needs to be immediately quantifiable or it doesn't count. But we also have a responsibility as a marketing and advertising industry. I think we forgot what industry we're actually in, right? We're in the trust business. We're not in the content business. We're not in the ads business. We're in the trust business. And ads and content are all symptoms, especially if they're engaged, of trust, right?

19:15And we often talk about the fact that, and let's start with the conversion funnel. That was basically a roadmap to a marriage between a brand and its audience. It was the route to the altar, if you will. That's half the story. We know to be able to have a happy marriage and the biggest form of trust is belonging and long-term and tenure. But let's just race to the altar for a second. Before, brands would make themselves aware, so awareness, so you'll make yourself known, you'll make yourself liked and considered, and then you'll get married. Whereas now, because of those performance metrics, you don't like racing to the altar.

19:51Everyone's basically running an escort service, right? Straight to conversion. I don't even know you. I don't even like you. I just want you to buy from me, right? And we basically need to unlearn that short-term thinking and start to think a lot longer term in terms of like the race to the altar between the brand and its audience. Well, this is my little gag, which is marketers are trying to create a successful marriage, whereas finance people think they're running an escort agency, fundamentally. They're only interested in aggregate individual transactions. they're not interested in progressive value exchange over time.

20:29Because that's all that shows up on their measure. Because you have a metric for transactional value, you don't have a metric for relational value. Actually, funnily enough, this actually brings us back to the conversation I had with John at Leon, which is it's very, very easy for people to overscale a fast food restaurant concept. You think you're doing really well because lots of people are visiting you once out of curiosity. And so as far as you're concerned, for the first six months to a year, you're growing really impressively. The problem is that eventually none of those people come back.

21:06And actually what it is is you've measured the transactions. You haven't measured propensity to repeat. Then you wonder why you're Hugh Hefner, right? That's the fact of what happened. The love goes once the money goes. And then really, once you race to the altar, it's all about advocacy. getting your customers to get other customers on board because of the experiences you've given them. Then it's about defensibility. Can you survive cancel culture? Do people come to your aid just like Beyonce has the beehives? Have you got your own beehives to be able to defend you when times get tough? And then effectively then it's belonging.

21:39Do you have the same pool that a football team has with its fans? Have you got people that are advocates for you and that you're ingrained in their identity basically have you got swifties right and that's the long that's the altar first to marriage and the altar to the race to belonging so almost everything you need to do to create that kind of relationship is something that your finance person will find deeply unattractive either because it's unquantifiable or because it seems like discretionary expenditure or in your case because it makes something that they want to be fast slow yeah exactly we've had that already like so we had one company selling timeshares of all things we did a social media campaign seven percent of people who saw their ads saved it like that's insane data for them and we were like that's amazing so we were all excited to present it back to them and they were like yeah we're not going to use it again so seriously you have killer stats like that yeah yeah we're But they're not allowed to...

22:44Now, this is a really interesting philosophical question. If you do something with the aim of obtaining one metric and it instead achieves a remarkable different metric, is it cheating to say that's still a success, right? It's a bit like saying, if you go to a party to cop off with somebody and actually they don't turn up, but you buy a winning lottery ticket on the way home that makes you£20 ,000, you're supposed to say that's a bad day. Do you see what I mean? Because my view is it's perfectly legitimate to achieve success through means which you didn't intend to begin with. I'll give you an example of this.

23:23John Roberts at AO. Someone's looking out and he's scandalized by this. I think it's perfectly legitimate to get lucky. Actually, profiting from luck rather than intention is a totally legitimate way to be successful. And yet, weirdly, we only deem it as success. to the extent that it was what you planned to achieve in the first place. Now, AO, John Roberts, justifies the bears. You all know that if you order a washing machine from AO and there are children in your home, they have a box of bears in the back of the van and they give your kids a branded bear. Okay? And they ask, how do we justify that?

24:02Because you can measure the effect. You can have a control group who you didn't give a bear and you can have a third control group where you said, here's a bear, which I'm not going to give to you. okay you know um now you could measure it but it'd take about five years they noticed something completely different which was every single person on trust pilot who mentioned the bear gave them a five-star review okay now my viewers that's okay keep doing it okay just because it's not a standard metric just because it's not by the way and what's happening with all these metrics what are the metrics you're using they're the same as all your competitors so what's going to happen you're going to come, I think there was someone talking about Suzuki, wasn't there, before, on the stage before us.

24:45When you have the same metrics as everybody else in your category, oh, surprise, surprise, you become more and more similar. Okay? So now you have no distinctiveness, you have no differentiation, because you've created this thing called corporate isomorphism, where every company in a category starts pursuing exactly the same metrics as everybody else, which, by the way, they're not your metrics. They've probably been devised by meta or alphabet to make them as much money as possible. Right? Okay? And you're becoming more and more similar. You're now engaged in head-to-head competition, which means that, surprise, surprise, meta and alphabet make all the money because it's now them deciding who gets to effectively see you and who doesn't get to see you.

25:34And it's weird because lots and lots of things are perfectly rational at the narrow level, which become utterly stupid when everybody else does the same thing. And we don't actually have a word for this, but that's exactly what's happening in digital advertising. Now, what you've done is you've provided people with an opportunity to say, let's pursue a different metric, which will now make us completely different in the marketplace, and will probably appeal to people whom none of our competitors are currently appealing to. It's highly likely to be incremental value. And people go, yeah, but how does that help me get my bonus?

26:12Well, this is it. So if it's not a media, it's not for everybody. But over time, there's a long roadmap in terms of what we're doing because obviously we're on the disruption stage. And this is a big industry to try and disrupt. But there are people that care. There's a hell of a lot of people that don't really care. And they do just want to get their bonuses. Yeah. But in the companies that we're working with, there's always somebody who wants to affect some change. And over time, I mean, we fully expect the saveable mechanic to become a standard because of the data that we are getting. So those who we are working with are seeing the incremental benefit of going from an impression, which is taking seconds, and nobody's doing anything with it.

26:53And it's utterly, actually useless in terms of any kind of learnings from a brand. And we're turning that moment into months of engagement. Straight off the bat. And I think from our perspective, having that kind of third state, where you don't have to lean everything onto the impression, or even on the conversion itself, the industry can actually start finding a way to adjust and move more towards a value exchange with the consumer, because they don't have to push absolutely everything straight away. You see the ad you must buy now, otherwise it's a failure. And that's something that we are starting to see in the movement.

27:28So we're integrating with DSPs to do this at scale. because the other thing, to your point, where everybody's using the same metrics, now everybody's using the same AI effectively. It's table stakes. So it's the data that's going to make the difference. And having intent data that you can feed back into any campaign is we're reducing CAC by like 66%. So everything for us is moving as lightning fast as it is for everybody else. We're just learning with it. But there are people who care, so there is hope. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling?

28:05Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Just for interest, how many people here have used Heathrow pod parking? okay do you love it yeah absolutely everybody okay this is a classic case of metric where you become imprisoned by pre-existing metrics okay because the really fascinating thing about the Heathrow pod parking is that it's about a mile away from terminal five but the prices they charge are only a couple of pounds a day less than a short stay and the reason is people really enjoy riding in the pod.