Give Me a One-Handed Marketer

Harry Truman famously said:

"Give me a one-handed economist."

His frustration was that every economist seemed incapable of giving a straight answer. Every recommendation came with caveats.

"On the one hand..."

"On the other hand..."

As a younger woman, I found that kind of thinking frustrating, too. Why couldn't the experts just tell us the answer?

Of course, Truman’s economists were right.

One of the biggest misconceptions I had about science was that it was primarily concerned with certainty. Science felt like the domain of facts, rules, and immutable truths. If something was scientific, it was settled.

What I've come to realize is that science is often much more concerned with uncertainty than certainty.

Neil deGrasse Tyson once described toddlers as little scientists. Think about what happens when a toddler knocks a cup of milk off the table. After you've cleaned it up, what do they want to do?

They want to knock it over again.

Not because they're trying to make your life difficult (alleges Tyson… I’m not convinced), but because they're running an experiment. They want to know whether the same thing happens every time. Is the result guaranteed? Does it happen most of the time? Sometimes? Under what conditions?

They're trying to better understand the world around them.

That's what science is. Not a search for guarantees, but a process for understanding probabilities.

Most of the important questions in life don't have certain answers.

• Will this investment make money?

• Will this policy improve the economy?

• Will this vaccine prevent me from getting the flu?

The best we can usually do is understand the odds and make informed decisions.

In many ways, that's what economists do. They study incredibly complex systems filled with human behavior, competing incentives, and countless variables. A good economist rarely tells you that something is guaranteed to happen. Instead, they tell you what is likely to happen, what risks exist, and how confident they are in their prediction.

Their job isn't to eliminate uncertainty. It's to help navigate it.

Good marketing works the same way.

Businesses often want certainty from their marketing partners.

• Will this campaign work?

• Will this audience convert?

• Will this creative outperform the current version?

• Will increasing budget generate more profit?

The honest answer is the same one Truman got from his economists.

It depends. On the one hand...

Real-world marketing is messy. Markets change. Competitors change. Consumer behavior changes. Platforms change. Economic conditions change.

Anyone claiming certainty is either oversimplifying reality or selling something. That doesn't mean marketing is guesswork. Quite the opposite.

The goal of data-driven marketing isn't to find the one perfect answer, but to continuously improve the odds.

Every test teaches us something.

Every campaign generates evidence.

Every customer interaction provides another data point.

Over time, those insights help us make better decisions, allocate resources more effectively, and place increasingly better-informed bets.

This is why our approach to paid digital marketing is rooted in experimentation, measurement, and learning, all tied to profit. We aren't trying to prove that a particular strategy is always right. We're trying to understand under what conditions it works, how reliably it works, and whether there's a better option available.

Some of my favorite books of the last few years have focused on exactly this idea. Books like The Drunkard's Walk by theoretical physicist and mathematician Leonard Mlodinow, and Superforecasting by psychologist Phillip E. Tetlock and academic/author Dan Gardner, explore the role that probability, randomness, expertise, and judgment play in decision-making. One of their central lessons is that successful people aren't necessarily better at predicting the future. They're often better at updating their beliefs as new information becomes available.

That's the mindset we try to bring to our clients.

Experience, expertise, and best practices matter. But they should never become dogma.

On the one hand, you want a marketer who has spent years studying their craft and understands what has worked in the past.

On the other hand, you want someone humble enough to recognize that this situation may be different.

Maybe the conventional wisdom is right. Maybe it's wrong. Maybe the answer is hiding somewhere in the data.

The businesses that win aren't the ones searching for certainty. They're the ones that define what goal matters to them and then consistently improve their odds. They gather evidence, assess risk, learn quickly, and make informed decisions.

Like Truman's economists, the best marketers are often the ones willing to acknowledge nuance.

On the one hand, that can be frustrating.

On the other hand, it's how the real world works.