World Series of Poker

You know I enjoy Weather, and Pickleball, and Ryan Hall Y'all (which is weather again), and Headphones.

I also thoroughly enjoy YouTube coverage of the World Series of Poker each June.

Why?

These folks are doing the exact same thing you're asked to do ... except they have to do it every ninety seconds.

You have a report where the ROAS of a Facebook campaign is measured. You know what the campaign costs, you know the sales you generate, and you had better darn well know how much the customer pays you downstream to know if your investment was a good decision or not. You know what your customers pay you downstream, right? Right?

It's not different here. You have two cards that nobody can see. Your opponents have two cards you can't see. Based on your two cards and your guess of somebody else's cards, you calculate your probability of winning the hand. Maybe your probability of winning the hand is 48%. Your opponent bets $1,000,000. You have $5,000,000 left, and there are $3,000,000 in the pot. Do you call? I mean, you'll be paid 3x as much as your bet for an approximate 50/50 chance of winning ... what do you do? What happens if the hand continues and you are forced to go all-in (which will undoubtedly happen)?

You make decisions every ninety seconds.

One of the things I've witnessed in my consulting career is the behavior of professionals who don't have to make decisions once every ninety seconds. The less often the professional has to make hard decisions with incomplete information, the more the professional stalls and refuses to make any decisions until the professional has complete information.

Attribution vendors prey on these people. Every single attribution solution is horribly wrong, but they are sold as "truth". Because it is sold as "truth", the professional is willing to make decisions ... often bad decisions, believing what s/he is doing is "right".

I spoke at a conference in 2016 ... that's a lifetime ago! The presenter (who worked for an attribution vendor) shared five (5) different attribution solutions produced by her agency ... and she (and her agency) had the courage to say that every single solution offered a different view of campaign results. The audience simply groaned. They didn't want five possible / different outcomes. They wanted "truth". They groaned because the vendor had integrity.

If you want to be a great decision maker, learn to play poker. Poker teaches you how to guess properly, poker teaches you to "pretend" (bluff), poker teaches you to calculate short-term and long-term value. Poker teaches you that you can lose even if you do everything right. Poker teaches you that you can win even if you do everything wrong (this happens in business every day).

And you don't have to play against the "unsavories" (i.e. personalities you'd rather never have to meet in person). Play against a computer. You'll learn everything you need to learn to become a better Marketing Professional.

By the way, AI has no idea how to create a reasonable poker cartoon.