Placing Bets on Consumer Action

Former professional gambler Peter Sells talks about his strategy for mitigating risk in this marketing behavior keynote. Discussing his personal history with horse races, Peter Sells shares his drive to find the hidden relationships between data and outcome. Rather than focusing on the stats that were posted at the bookies, Sells looked at the money flow and who was placing the bets.

After creating an app that would track this information, the marketing guru noticed that there was a group of people who knew more (trainer, stable girl, jockey, owner) and a group of people who knew less (gamblers) about the horses being bet on. This shift in attention can be described as changing from a focus on conventional data to live behavioral data.

The same can be applied towards modern marketing strategies. In the words of Peter Sells, "it is better to take live data and feed that data back into a business plan in order to understand which bets to place instead of coming up with a big idea, selling it to a client and placing one big bet."