The final schedule for Hero Conf 2015, April 27-29 in Portland, OR is coming together quickly. Day 2 opens with an in-depth keynote session from PPC luminary, Andrew Goodman.
PPC is not only a significant driver of company growth; some companies have grown fundamentally dependent on the channel. If PPC is the air your company breathes, then small-ball execution isn’t your only concern. You also have to be aware of any potential looming, larger threats to the health and well-being of that channel.
On the heels of trenchant insights in books like Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, and Antifragile, Nassim Taleb has drafted another masterpiece entitled Silent Risk. In this spirit, we will cover looming silent risks in the PPC universe. Catastrophic risks aren’t “mistakes” or small operational problems. They’re fundamental flaws in “vision,” in assumptions, and categorizations of the types of bets we are making.
At the end of the day, you’ve got to prepare appropriately for these invisible threats, a process that can be hard to engage in once you’ve developed tunnel vision. In business as in all human perception, analysts may be afflicted by a “What You See Is All There Is” (WYSIATI) bias. In accounts of the 2008 financial crisis precipitated by the subprime mortgage meltdown, high-placed officials in national governments, and top analysts at bond rating agencies, were asked what the fallout might be if they adjusted their models to take account of a 35% drop in home prices. Since that was deemed nearly impossible, they often replied they “had no model” that included such information. Risk defined out of existence in tautological fashion: a dangerous game indeed. All the models show a lifetime of prosperity for the turkey, until Thanksgiving Day.
Will your PPC account continue driving company growth, or are you one or two looming threats away from the need to shut down the channel entirely? Your speaker will discuss the silent risks of: Amazon; flawed views of causation; hyper-action bias; reporting fraud; attribution jealousy; and numerous other hidden phenomena that can derail a company’s PPC fortunes to the point of putting a company’s growth plans and profitability at risk.
Does Chicken Little make a compelling case? Listen to this talk, and judge for yourself.
