#152: Quo Vadis Green Shoot AdTech Interviews
With Joe Martin, CEO/Co-founder of Tickle, lightweight plumbing that makes any ad unit, on any channel, saveable to a consumer's Apple or Google Wallet.
Quo Vadis Green Shoot AdTech Interviews with Audion
Welcome back to Quo Vadis Green Shoot AdTech Interviews. In this series, we’re stepping into the shoes of “AdTech Equalizers” — the greenshoot companies changing how the advertising job gets done. We’ll delve into their worldview and unveil new strategies, tools, and perspectives that make advertisers more effective.
Today, we have the great pleasure of speaking with Joe Martin, CEO and founder of Tickle, the global infrastructure for saveable ads. Lightweight plumbing that makes any ad unit, on any channel, saveable to a consumer's Apple or Google Wallet as a persistent branded asset they choose to keep.
If you like this interview, join Joe and Quo Vadis on June 15 at 11 AM ET for a live webinar called “Bought by Algorithms. Ignored by Humans. Who’s Advertising Actually For?“
If you want to learn more about how Tickle is making saveable ads the new standard, reach out to Joe directly at joe@tickle.com or meet him at Cannes Lions. Tickle is currently mid-way through its seed round, so if you are an investor who wants to understand the opportunity, Joe would certainly like to hear from you.
Before we kick off our interview with Joe, watch what the legendary Rory Sutherland had to say when he stumbled across Tickle in his own.
Rory also talked about Tickle as “it’s not ‘click here-buy-now’, it’s ‘save-to-wallet’ on The Bottleneck Podcast.
Q1: Your own research found that 78% of consumers have taken a screenshot of an ad on their phone to remember it later. What does that number actually tell us about how advertising has been built?
A: Joe Martin
It tells us the consumer was interested, but busy doing something else. The industry just gave them nothing useful to do about it.
78% comes from our own statistically significant research, and every time I share it in a room, people nod along because they’ve done it themselves. A screenshot of a sofa they want. A holiday offer. A pair of trainers. They took a screenshot because it was the most frictionless, least interruptive option available for saving something for later.
Digital advertising has run on a binary motion for its entire existence: click or don’t click. We think that’s been a product design failure for 30 years now.
The click says, “I’m ready now.” The no-click says nothing, but the industry has spent decades trying to infer meaning from it anyway. Every probabilistic model, every intent signal, every retargeting pixel is the industry guessing at what no-click means.
Tickle introduces a third state. Unlike everything that sits between the click and the no-click, this one is deterministic. It’s a simple swipe to save a micro action. One movement, no friction, just a signal of intent. The ad remains clickable for the consumer who is ready now. The save is for the majority who aren’t ready yet.
A saved ad is a deliberate, voluntary, human-verified motion that says: “I want this, just not right now.” Not inferred, not modeled, not probabilistic. The consumer is telling you something true, in real time, that no other interaction in the current stack can produce.
And here is the thing that gets missed in almost every conversation about advertising innovation: People don’t shop the way an impression is designed to be acted on. They browse, they discover, they return when they’re ready. That’s how considered purchasing has always worked.
At the end of the day, advertising was built for a moment while consumers live in time. Tickle closes that gap without asking anyone in the industry to change a single thing they’re currently doing.
Q2: When most people hear “saveable ad,” they picture a browser bookmark that is immediately forgotten. Why is the mobile wallet fundamentally different, and how does Tickle actually work in practice?
A: Joe Martin
Browser bookmarks require the consumer to remember that they made them. Nobody does that. On the other hand, a screenshot has replaced the bookmark for years now. Moreover, the mobile wallet is not just for storage. It’s a live communications channel. It sits where a consumer’s boarding pass, bank card, and event ticket already live, natively in iOS and Android.
Tickle unlocks that channel for brands to build a direct communication highway on our rails, delivering branded assets to the most trusted, most personal screen a consumer owns.
It doesn’t matter how the ad was created or how it arrived. Display, video, social, CTV, programmatic open web, direct buy, etc. Tickle exists dynamically alongside the existing creative. No new production, no creative lift. It’s the product of decades of experience from a team spanning the entire advertising stack, from leading AI practitioners and consumer psychologists to adtech architects, all distilled into a single tickbox solution that now sees our rails being used across four continents with zero to minimal lift on the client side.
On one hand, AI is making the creation and delivery of ads faster and more efficient. On the other hand, if you arrive at the consumer’s screen with the most perfectly optimized campaign and they still weren’t ready to act, and you still can’t attribute what happens next, you’ve solved the wrong problem.
Then there is the age-old topic of engagement and attribution, two stubborn failures at the core of this industry for 30 years now. Tickle works at, and after the moment the impression lands. That’s a different and more common-sense approach.
Another great thing about saveable ads is that they don’t compete with other formats. Instead, we complete them.
It gets even better when it comes to bots. Bots operate freely across every major platform in the programmatic stack, but they cannot save an asset to a mobile wallet. In that sense, every save is categorically different from any other engagement signal in the ecosystem.
Q3: What results have surprised you most?
A: Joe Martin
Two, from different categories, that reveal the same underlying ah-ha lightbulb.
The first came through one of our platform integrations. A campaign for a leading global CPG brand delivered a post-click action rate of 23%, 5x the benchmark for an equivalent action in CPG display. Of those, 88% chose to save the branded asset rather than click through to the brand’s site immediately.
The consumer signal is something like, “I want this, but not right now.” That signal does not exist in any current attribution model, and there is no metric that captures deferred intent when it forms. In effect, our infrastructure is built to reveal a consumer preference.
Of those savers, 54% clicked out to the brand’s site when prompted by lock screen notifications in the days and weeks that followed, and that number grows week on week as prompts align with the moment the consumer is actually ready to purchase. In other words, the branded asset kept delivering long after the impression had closed.
The second came from a leading luxury auction house. Nine of the top ten-selling lots had been saved as branded assets prior to auction day. The data identified the true buyer cohort as a geographic demographic that Meta’s algorithm had not predicted. Since the agency could only work with what the platform reported, Tickle was able to provide a layer of revealed preferences. The result was a 66% reduction in cost per acquisition against the market average from a single campaign.
We now see brands returning for second and third campaigns to re-engage their existing wallet audience and build it further with new placements. What’s really great to see as a founder is how they are now treating us as a new owned communication channel rather than a one-off media activation.
Q4: Advertising has tried persistent formats before, e.g., browser notifications, loyalty apps, and email lists. They all eventually broke down due to friction, fatigue, or the next platform iteration. What makes the mobile wallet different?
A: Joe Martin
We have found three key differences. The first is that the wallet is OS-level infrastructure, not a third-party app. It lives natively on iOS and Android (the same layer as your bank card). There is no user behavioral change required, no download, and no new relationship to form. The infrastructure already exists on effectively every smartphone on earth. Tickle offers a key to unlock it for brands.
Secondly, wallet notifications achieve read rates above 90% because of what they bypass. Three decades of spam, scams, and phishing have trained the industry to apply an automatic skepticism to anything arriving digitally. Psychologists call this “persuasion knowledge,” the brain’s pre-conscious filter that asks, “Can this be trusted? or Did I ask for it?” or “Do I have confidence in the intent?” before engagement ever happens.
AI is making that reflex more necessary by the day, but wallet notifications bypass it entirely because the consumer opts in, and the source is already trusted. There is zero skepticism to overcome.
Lastly, once saved, the friction is gone permanently because the consumer has already committed. Every subsequent notification doesn’t ask them to decide whether to engage with a brand. Instead, that decision has already been made at the moment of the save. You are no longer re-finding someone who saw an impression. You are returning to someone who raised their hand, and building a relationship doesn’t feel like a burden.
Q5: Every conversation in adtech right now ends with AI. Agents are about to buy and sell media autonomously, generate creative, and optimize without human input. Is Tickle a winner or a loser in that world?
A: Joe Martin
Not only does it make us a winner, but it also lets us win faster. As more of the bid stream becomes synthetic, agent-generated traffic with AI-optimized creative, automated buying and selling at scale, the most valuable signal left is one that cannot be simulated.
Bots will always improve at mimicking clicks, view-through rates, and even downstream attribution events, but there is no agentic solution that can save an asset to a real human being’s mobile wallet and generate a genuine lock screen response. In a world of synthetic everything, a verified human save becomes the scarcest and most credible signal in advertising.
Our north star is simple.
Saveable should be a standard tickbox on every media plan, the way viewability measurement is today. And what accumulates alongside that standard, campaign by campaign, is certainly a conversation worth having.
See Quo Vadis at Cannes Lions
#CannesLions is around the corner! Looking forward to seeing you at these events.
Commerce Media: See this series of Fluent events. Sir Martin Sorrell and I will have a chat and open it up to Q&A.
Agency Agentic Flows: 50-person RSVP breakfast with AtomicAds, the winner of the AdEF founder pitch event in March
Signal owners, platform leaders, and operators are rebuilding the layer underneath advertising. 50-person RSVP breakfast with Brian O’Kelley and Gabriel DeWitt, hosted by Above Data.
Criteo Lunch Panel: Measurement Models and Redefining Efficiency with Brian Wieser, Todd Parsons, and Tom Triscari
Buyer/Seller Agents: 25-person RSVP lunch with pubX
PMG Beach: How to Survive in a Post-LiveRamp World at PMG Beach: Sam Bloom, Mathieu Roche from ID5, and yours truly tell it like it is.
Criteo Yacht Talk: Wired Different. B.R.O.s at Work
C Wire AdTech Chill House: 1-1 chat with Sir Martin + Audience Q&A. We’ll end the week talking about what happened and why it matters.
Disclaimer: This post, and any other post from Quo Vadis, should not be considered investment advice. This content is for informational purposes only. You should not construe this information, or any other material from Quo Vadis, as investment, financial, or any other form of advice.