WDMA - Daily Marketing News · John Miglautsch

Predictable Marketing in Uncertainty

·38 min·2 clips

The hook is uncertainty. Miglosch reads from Tom Fishburne's Monday post, jumps back to early March 2020, and uses a cartoon about uncertainty as a lesson in prediction. He remembers the paranoia. The business-card-and-LimeAway story is not just a detour. It is his way of getting at how fear can bend judgment before you know what is driving the result. Then comes the rock. His point: prediction begins with causal forces, the factors acting on the thing, instead of treating uncertainty like bad weather. That is the hinge. From there he moves to a friend's golf catalog, a tiny 2,000-piece mailing, and a deal where better performance could be tracked. The golf analogy carries the episode. A 73 and an 85 do not tell you much unless both players faced the same course, on the same day, under comparable conditions. Right, isolate the variables. That is why he ends up defending direct mail. A controlled mailing lets you test a change against real response instead of arguing over vibes. Mass media gets a hard side-eye. His claim is blunt, and he grounds it in his own experience: for 40 years, direct mail has seemed to beat mass media because it gives you guaranteed engagement and room to validate an experiment. This is not a love letter to paper. It is an operator's case for channels you can track, compare, and prove. The book plug is rough. Near the end, Spinning strong of gold gets mentioned in that practical, slightly messy way: paperback, Kindle, not expensive, cover botched somehow. The roughness fits. Certainty does not come from polished talk. It comes from isolating causes and proving what moved the sale.

As heard by us

A plainspoken case for predictable marketing through controlled testing in uncertain conditions.

John Miglosch argues that marketing gets more reliable when the conditions are controlled and the cause-and-effect chain is clear. He uses a direct mail example and a golf comparison to show why matched circumstances matter, since weather or other outside forces can muddy the…

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