Hello there,

As summer begins across the Northern Hemisphere at last, I’ve got a particularly hot edition for you today.

Today’s startup has extended its pre-seed round for a fresh way of addressing the relationship between audiences and advertisers - something less creepy than all the behind-the-scenes tracking that adtech has seemed desperate to cling on to for so long. Scroll down to read all about London-based Tickle.

Meanwhile, we’re trying something new with this edition of PreSeed Now. Manchester Angels has supported this issue to unlock the full edition to all subscribers as part of a special experiment.

Speaking of Manchester, the city played host to GP Bullhound’s Northern Tech Awards last Thursday, and what a great event it was. Few awards combine traditionally judged prizes with a ranking based on companies’ raw financial metrics.

It turns out that’s a great way to discover the quietly successful companies that often don’t get much media attention. There are a lot more of them out there than you might think if media coverage was the only lens you viewed the tech industry through.

With that in mind, let’s give a startup some media attention! 😉

— Martin

👼 Introducing Manchester Angels

Today’s edition of PreSeed Now has been generously unlocked for readers by Manchester Angels. This new organisation has been launched to provide a crucial missing part of the Manchester city region’s tech ecosystem: the ability to connect high-quality deals with the right angel investors at the right time, with the right mentoring.

Manchester Angels consists of local, actively investing angels with considerable experience in building and exiting technology businesses. They will invest in, and nurture these businesses. The organisation is backed by founding partners GP Bullhound and Bruntwood, and supported by investor partners Praetura Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Northern Gritstone, and Silicon Valley Bank. 

Manchester Angels is already up and running and making deals. To find out more and get in touch, visit manangels.co.uk.

Tickle is building a new way to do targeted ads

Online advertising is something most of us love to complain about. We’ve all had an experience like shoes that follow you around the web for months after you bought them. I see ads for the car I drive on almost every website, which makes me wonder how much money the manufacturer is happy wasting.

But when online advertising works well it can be a really positive experience. I’ve discovered many great events and products I’d never have known about without a well-placed ad. That said, as you browse around websites and apps, it can be easy to lose those ads you’re interested in and never find them again.

Tickle is a new startup that wants to solve the problem. And while it’s doing that, it’s also addressing consumer and regulator concern about adtech tracking people around the internet, and advertiser concern about the coming demise of third-party cookies in Google’s Chrome browser. 

It’s a simple idea that sounds like a novelty, but if it works, it could give advertisers the targeting they crave while helping consumers feel more in control of their relationship with advertising.

‘Tickle’ an ad… and win?

“What we found from our research is that 78% of consumers already screenshot ads and content to go back to later,” says Tickle co-founder and CEO Joe Martin.

He says his startup is “turning that mechanic which has gone unnoticed, unmonetised, and unmeasured, into a product to keep the consumer in the publisher’s app or website. The big annoyance [is] you don't click on ads because you get taken into something else. Whereas with this you see something you like, you swipe it, and carry on doing what you're doing.”

Tickle offers a new ad format that enables consumers to save any ad or content for later. Its patent-pending technology then matches the content of the ad to offer rewards and experiences from the brands in the ads a user saves. So brands can offer ‘win the product in the ad’ incentives, for example.

“The brands we work with will use their programmatic spend, but they'll spend it through us,” explains Martin. “The ads will be exactly the same as they are today but as you scroll up the page there'll be a blue mask over the ad, which will identify as a Tickle ad with a call to action to swipe to win the ad or save it for later. 

“So if a consumer sees that, they can simply swipe it. If it's the first time that they swipe a Tickle ad, they'll get prompted at that point to download the app. If it's any time beyond that, it just gets saved directly into their wallet, they'll get a notification say they've saved whatever the content of the ad is and they can just carry on.”

Meanwhile, Tickle is collecting data about users who have opted in. “As we're starting to collect that data about them, we match it to things that they're actually interested in,” says Martin. “And then in the app itself… we enable the users to go in tell us the brands they are interested in so they can follow their favourite brands, be the first find out what the brands are up to, see the ads before anybody else…”

‘See the ads before anyone else’ sounds a bit of a reach as a consumer benefit, but there might be something in it if you’re really into a brand. Martin argues that consumers don’t hate ads, they hate being interrupted. “Consumers crave novelty and change, and the latest and greatest from [their] favourite brands. So we enable them to do that”.

And users can switch off brands they’re no longer interested in, giving them more control (and giving Tickle more data).

A better way of targeting ads?

Essentially what Tickle is building here is a new kind of ad network for engaged consumers, allowing the interactive targeting that social media platforms can offer, but without the need to keep building the latest trendy social features to keep the audience around.

If Tickle can build up a strong base of advertisers and users, along with enough websites and apps using its SDK, it will be able to target ads based on specific, opt-in user tastes.

After studying forensic psychology and spending some time working in that field, Martin took his skills into the world of behavioural psychology in advertising. He launched a ‘Pokémon Go for brands’ AR treasure hunt app called Snatch which raised two rounds in 2016 and 2017 from the likes of firstminute Capital and Unilever Ventures. 

Snatch ended up being acquired by mobile gaming company Playstack, and rebranded as Dibs. After he left the business, Martin wanted to take what he had learned about active consumer engagement with brands and apply it to traditional ads. He teamed up with experienced ad industry operator Gareth Owen to devise Tickle.

They were inspired by widely shared figures that say mobile ads on Google’s display network have an average conversion rate of 0.72%. Martin and Owen realised this meant that 99.28% of ad displays don’t convert, leaving plenty of room for improvement.

The question is… will anyone really want to engage with ads in the way Tickle hopes? After all, use of ad blockers has been on the rise for years. Will enough people want to do more with the ads they see?

Citing Tickle’s own research, Martin says 84% of people who use ad blockers say they don't want to block ads entirely, they just want to be able to filter the ones that they're interested in. He’s confident that there’s real potential for a habit-forming product here, and that with Google ditching third-party cookies next year, the timing is right to introduce a different kind of adtech that promotes a different kind of relationship between advertisers and audiences.

Navigating challenges

A clear challenge will be educating users to treat ads in a different way, but until Tickle’s ad interface is ready, it’s hard to assess how successful they might be. 

Co-founder and COO Gareth Owen points out another industry-wide challenge the company will face: many ad budgets will be constrained over the summer due to the current uncertainty around the economy.

“I think this is going to be one of the quietest summers in history for advertising… but those are small headwinds, because really what we're asking for from launch is a very small amount of somebody's advertising budget in order to futureproof themselves against what's coming next year [with Google’s cookie changes],” says Owen.

“We've got a product that is going to be exciting for users, it's going to solve a lot of problems for brands, [and] publishers are certainly keen to try and make sure that they monetise the ads on their platforms better than they have done historically, as well… 

“Whether it's investors or whether it's just people within the industry, they're very keen to back what we're doing because it is different, and everybody wants to see different solutions to problems when they are as big as the problems that advertising has.”

Tickle has been developed as a business with help Founders Factory, who Martin knew due to related investor firstminute Capital having invested in his previous startup. He says Founders Factory’s large network has helped with setting up pitches with big-names like Reckitt Benckiser.  

“A big part of what Gaz [Gareth Owen] and I talked about, in this round in particular, was making sure that we had smart capital,” says Martin. “The difference between an investor that can bring you more than just money, and those that are just the cash part is night and day. 

“If we're giving advice to anyone—pre-seed or any stage—break your back to find the right people who are passionate about what you're doing and have the contacts throughout your sector to really make it move.”

Others on Tickle’s team include Tor Gisvold (veteran CTO and current technical director with Toyota Connected Europe), experienced digital creative Mark Dodson as creative director, and former PwC partner Mike Greig as financial director. Martin says the team at Manchester-based developers Apadmi are building the initial Tickle products before it’s all brought in-house.

Gearing up for launch

Tickle closed off its pre-seed round last month but has re-opened it to accommodate the level of interest Martin says they’re seeing.

Martin says those already invested include Founders Factory and Reckitt Benckiser, plus a host of angels with deep connections to the advertising, marketing, and media world. 

And that makes some sense. As third-party tracking cookies shuffle towards the exit, there’s an opportunity for new approaches to get their chance to shine. And as Martin says, you can’t get much different than Tickle.

“The way that people buy media and the way that they want to engage with their customers is already relatively set in stone and we are very disruptive… The whole ad tech industry… is not permissions based, [with] intrusive tracking across third-party data sources that you never know about as a user. We’re the polar opposite of that.”

We’ll get a chance to see if brands and audiences are ready for that opposite approach when Tickle launches later this year.

In summary:

Name: Tickle

What they do: Adtech to empower and incentivise the audience

Location: London

Raised to date: Initial pre-seed round

Currently raising?: Yes, extended pre-seed round

That’s all for now

I’m particularly interested in your feedback about this specific issue. Feel free to drop me an email with your thoughts.

PreSeed Now will be back on Thursday. See you in your inbox then.