MMM is about hedging against bad bets.

Some vendors tell clients that – make many bets, some will fail. But on average, you will win.

I disagree, the above advice or logic comes from gambling.

The very purpose of measurement is to ‘Not to gamble’ with your marketing spends.

I take inspiration from Nassim Taleb’s writing and I think all marketers should do too.

Taleb opines in many of his books that the goal is to avoid total ruin. Taking many irrational bets inflates tail risks and risks ruin.

He also opines that apart from Financial traders, lawyers are the ones who get this concept. They always try to hedge with multiple optionality.

🎯 MMM is Not About Taking More Bets

It is about Reducing the number of wrong bets.

Think about it for a minute. We build MMM first to know which variables affected your KPI and which didn’t.

Why do this ?

Because this will tell you where not to spend your dollars/Euros/Rupees.

MMM at its core, is a filtering engine. Not a “try everything” engine.

📌 Saturation Curve : Knowing the limits

Second, think about the saturation curves

We plot saturation curves often to know where our ‘stopping point’ is, have we reached there or exceeded it?

Yes, the other side of the coin also informs you whether you have left money on the table by not operating anywhere closer to the saturation point. But most often in our practice,  clients’ first question is – Have we over spent on any channel?

📌 Taleb’s Lens: Subtraction > Addition

Nassim Taleb often emphasizes:

“In complex systems, improvement comes more from removal than addition.”

I believe MMM follows this principle as well:

– Remove ineffective channels
– Remove over-saturated spends
– Remove false positives

📌 Why “More Bets” Fails in MMM Context

Couple of weeks ago, I wrote how 90% of the clients already know their top marketing / media channels with out MMM.

They got to this point by taking some measured bets. Now the job of a MMM vendor is not to make them take more bets but to tell them what they can do better with the identified channels.

Clients have figured out ‘what works’, now the goal is to find ‘how much it works’ and what is the limit.

📌 MMM as a Risk Hedging System

A good MMM doesn’t push you to Expand blindly

It forces you to:

✅ Concentrate intelligently
✅ Allocate spends conservatively
✅ Avoid chasing ineffective channels

This is classic risk hedging.

Growth doesn’t always come from adding more.

Sometimes it comes from:

▪️Spending less in the wrong places
▪️Stopping earlier on the saturation curves
▪️Saying “no” more often than “yes”

📌 In summary:

MMM is not a system for placing bets.
It is a system for surviving bad bets. Avoiding Total Ruin for a brand.