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

Joe Martin founded Tickle, a platform that lets people save an ad into their phone wallet instead of buying right now. Live at MAD//Fest, he joins Rory and Elfried to ask a blunt question: why do so many companies chase the same metrics as their competitors, and end up looking exactly like them? They trace how optimising for what's easy to measure can work against what actually makes a business succeed, from a CPG brand that got an outstanding result and refused to repeat it, to Soviet factories that paid workers by the weight of the chandeliers they built, until the ceilings gave way. "Good numbers" and "a good business" have quietly become two different things. This episode is about telling them apart. Timestamps 00:22 – Bottleneck's second-ever live show 01:40 – What Tickle actually does 02:21 – Why most ads arrive at exactly the wrong moment 05:12 – A brand gets a great result and says no thanks 08:03 – The AR treasure hunt that led to Tickle 15:17 – Why clients are bonused on the wrong metrics 17:28 – "We're in the trust business, not the ads business" 20:29 – Why finance can't measure a relationship 21:12 – The AO teddy bear nobody can put on a spreadsheet 26:34 – Heathrow's pods and the tyranny of the wrong metric 29:40 – The Soviet chandelier problem 32:00 – Closing out MAD//Fest Follow Rory Instagram: @rorysutherland_clips TikTok: @Rorysutherlandclips X: @rorysutherland LinkedIn: in/rorysutherland/ Follow Elfried Instagram: @elfriedsamba LinkedIn: in/elfriedsamba/ https://www.butterflyeffect.xyz/ Follow Joe Martin LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/itsjoemartin https://jointickle.com/ A Sassy+ original podcast series