Cognitive Marketing Series: Heuristics and Biases Part 1

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This is a podcast episode titled, Cognitive Marketing Series: Heuristics and Biases Part 1. The summary for this episode is: <p>In the first episode of a miniseries on heuristics and biases, Bobby and Cole frame what heuristics and biases are and why marketers should care, as well as discuss some of the potential problems that arise when relying on other decision-making shortcuts. </p>
❓ What are heuristics?
02:18 MIN
👩‍💻 Heuristics and Marketing
00:27 MIN
💻 Bias in AI and Machine Learning
01:29 MIN
🪒 Occam's Razor
02:10 MIN
🤔 Heuristics are not inherently bad
01:12 MIN

Speaker 1: Welcome to the In the Clouds podcast. In The Clouds is a marketing cloud podcast powered by Lev, the most influential marketing focused Salesforce consultancy in the world. Lev is customer experience obsessed and podcast hosts Bobby Tichy and Cole Fisher have partnered with some of the world's most well known brands to help them master meaningful one on one connections with their customers. In this podcast, they'll combine strategy and deep technical expertise to share best practices, how tos and real life use cases and solutions for the world's top brands using Salesforce products today.

Bobby Tichy: Do you ever find yourself just watching the same shows over and over again?

Cole Fisher: Habitually. Even though I've watched them end to end in order multiple times, I'm like, yeah, this will be good. I was just watching, I was dying laughing to Seinfeld last night. The Bette Midler episode as George. You could say any episode and it is, oh, that's just fantastic. But just Kramer, he's just got me. He's just perfect. But I don't feel a need, I literally have the apps to watch any show or movie I could possibly watch, I could want at any time and I find myself running through Seinfeld reruns like it's going out of style, even though I just finished up the end to end Seinfeld rerun. I have to have something on the background. I don't want to pay attention to it necessarily but it's just always, it's just there. But yeah, I don't get into the new stuff.

Bobby Tichy: It's just this constant cycle of what I watch. Well, I take that back because I've watched some King of Queens but we're on this King Of Queens kick right now where just it's always on. We have recorded all the seasons and we're just going through every single season and I find myself just same thing. I'll watch a season. If I miss an episode, I'll go back and watch it. Or we always go through when we go to bed at night, we'll turn on Seinfeld or Arrested Development or Cheers. It's one of those three always. And we don't watch new TV. I think the only thing new that we watch is sports.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. I think if it's something that I don't know the outcome of, I'm not sure I want it on a script. I can watch new movies but if I don't know what the outcome is, it's because it's a hockey game that hasn't been played yet or it's the Super Bowl or something like that. I don't want to. I don't know, everything else I'm just comfortable watching Seinfeld or Boy Meets World or something like that. Just old school stuff that I don't really need to think about. The Office reruns, just classic. I know every episode's going to be good. Don't have to worry about it.

Bobby Tichy: And you already know the story. It's not like you have to pay all that close attention. I think the other thing too, what I've noticed or anytime we have tried to watch a new show, now everything's very dramatic. I guess there's not a lot of, I'm sure I'm completely wrong since I don't really pay attention but I can't think of a Seinfeld type of show on TV right now.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. I think you're right about this because that type of show is so rare. I even laughing out loud last night watching it I was just like, I just don't see how this can hold up so well. Everything, it's the times are so different. It was just in the 90s, which isn't that terribly long ago but the technology, the styles. I watched the cars, I'm like, oh my gosh. Those were really cars driving around, the box shaped Chrysler cop cars. It just looks so different. It looks so foreign. It looks so old but the stuff is still, the content is still so good. But it's funny you should mention that because it's I have all of the apps with you get Netflix and there's every show you could possibly want but I only want to watch like two or three shows on there because that makes things simple for me. It's our paradox choice that we talked about. Too many options and I'm just kind of stuck in that analysis paralysis. There's too many potential wrong decisions for me or I don't want to sit through a new episode of some show that I've never seen before and then 30 minutes later go, well that was a waste. I didn't know what I was getting into. And that was a gamble and I lost.

Bobby Tichy: It's very true. We were talking the other day about streaming services and if you just think about all the different streaming services out there now. I saw one advertised the other day, Tubi, T- U- B- I, which I've never heard of before. And I'm sure they've got millions of subscribers but you talk about people cutting the cord. Well, I'm pretty sure at this point, cable is more cheaper than having eight streaming services.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. And so I did that years ago, I cut the and I have all these apps and all these different devices and I find myself watching Seinfeld on the digital antenna. On locally aired, digital cable that you don't actually pay for the cable, it's just free over the air but I've got all these different options but it's again, it's that paradox of choice. I don't want to spend the time surfing, sifting through everything. I just want to put something on that I know is going to be funny and that I know is good, that I get my ROI on, have it on the background while I work or do whatever. That's my shortcut into not having to think too much or process too much.

Bobby Tichy: Which partly is nice into our topic or our mini series, we'll call it around being biased. Because obviously we're biased, well Seinfeld obviously, because it's the greatest show ever made.

Cole Fisher: Not even a bias, it's a fact.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, exactly. But so we're going to spend the next couple of episodes focusing on heuristics and biases. And first, having Cole walk us through what that is on this episode. And in the next episode, we'll dive into how these pose dangers to marketers. Basically how these can be an impediment to progress us and then the following episode we'll talk about how markers can benefit from them. And so I'd love for you to start because I Googled this earlier and I don't remember what it means but what's heuristic?

Cole Fisher: Think of heuristics and biases are subsets of heuristics. Think of heuristics as cognitive shortcuts. Just something that allows us, general rules of thumb that allow us to make decisions or make a judgment on something or solve a problem quickly without a lot of mental effort. When we're talking about all these different options of different TV shows and apps and what could we be streaming all this different content available to us, literally just almost infinite content available to us. It's a heuristic that I'm just saying," Well, I'll go with what I already know. I have this status quo routine of watching Seinfeld and I might as well just throw it on there because I know it's safe. I'm not going to lose anything. I'm not going to waste time." We talked about prospect theory last episode. And it's this concept that gaining something is good but losing something is unbearably more.

Bobby Tichy: Instead of spending 10 minutes trying to find something to watch, I just flip on Seinfeld because it takes no effort and it's done.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. And that's basically kind what a heuristic is. It's a mental shortcut that we don't need to assess all of the options in front of us. And so heuristics, biases, general favoritisms are not inherently a good or a bad thing. Really they're kind of a good thing in the fact that we have to rely on them. With our cognitive load, we have a limited bandwidth that allows us to make so much room for decisions. And we've talked before about the Steve Jobs effect, of why he wore a mock turtleneck and jeans every day because the concept is he's removing low level decision making. If he doesn't have to make the decision of what he has to wear when he gets up and little trivial decisions, then he can expend more of that cognitive load, more of that energy on higher level, strategic, more worthwhile decisions. I don't want to spend my time at night sifting through lots of content. And even if it's 10 or 20 minutes of reading all the content that's available, looking at all the different episodes and shows, I just go straight to Seinfeld and I get on with my work. That way I'm not expending mental energy on what I'm going to watch, something that's very trivial. Does that make sense?

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, totally. And I think we were talking about this the other day as well, where there's so many different things that a marketer could have access to or could do to improve their outcomes or their KPIs but they ended up just falling back into, I don't want to say what's comfortable because I don't mean it that way, but it's just I know this campaign is going to perform this way and so that's what I'm going to do.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. And so that's a status quo effect, which is again another heuristic and we'll actually get to that later on. But those are just little subtle nudges in our decision making that make things easier for us. And like I said, sometimes they're good and sometimes they're bad. What we'll do is in this episode, we'll start to kind of frame what heuristics are and what some of the potential problems are that we see in our decision making that require us to rely on heuristics and biases and these sort of decision making shortcuts. Then we'll get into on a latter episode what some of those heuristics are and how markers can kind of get tripped up with heuristics that don't benefit them. But at the same rate, again, these aren't necessarily good or bad. There are a number of heuristics and these sort of cognitive shortcuts that actually benefit and can be used, leveraged by marketers to either save time, provide better customer experiences, things like that. It really goes both ways. It's just a matter of being aware of them and how we can use them or make sure that we're avoiding the pitfalls of using some of these shortcuts. I kind of want to get into first off, we'll talk about kind of perceived rationality and we've mentioned this before. I think in our first step episode in the cognitive series was there's this kind of neoclassical economics rule, which is think of Homo economicus, he's a perfectly rational, sane human being that is not encumbered by emotion or context or anything when making decisions. And so in the textbook form, always makes perfectly rational decisions. And then, on the other end we have Homo economicus versus Homer Simpson and this is somebody who's in the everyday natural world encumbered by all the complexities, idiosyncrasies and idiocy that we run into every day and is plagued with real things of emotion and so psychology on one end of this spectrum of what we call perceived rationality. Psychology says," Well, we're all crazy and we can show things in a lab but the fact that this doesn't necessarily parlay into the real world means we're all crazy." And then neo- economics says," Everybody should be rational. There's no reason not to make rational decisions." Somewhere in the middle of this kind of this blend of behavioral economics, which just says that people make the best decisions they can in bounded rationality. And that's this sense of, we have limited bandwidth, we have finite cognitive load and there's only so many decisions and so much that we can weigh in these options. And so when we view it that way, that's the reason that we rely on a lot of these heuristics and biases and common effects that we leverage every day because if we literally weighed every single option, then you wouldn't be able to get dressed in the morning. There'd just be too many options of different jeans and Lev fleeces for you to wear. Having to weigh out everything and calculate everything becomes an issue. And so what we see in a lot of these heuristics and biases are some of these commonalities that are thread through a lot of different concepts that we've talked about. Cognitive load, that finite bandwidth, law of least effort. We rely on these because we don't want to expend that much energy. And so we want to make things as simple of a model as possible and then loss aversion as well. We're more afraid of losing something then we look forward to gaining something. And so these are just kind of the common threads woven throughout the fabric of why marketers and consumers rely on a lot of these decision making shortcuts.

Bobby Tichy: I guess, what's the correlation between, or I guess more a simplistic question of so biases are a subset of heuristics?

Cole Fisher: Yeah, basically. You just tend to have a favoritism of one thing over another. And so it could be that when I'm shopping at a retailer and there are tons of different iterations of a product. Well, I might like plaid or I might like to color red and I have a general bias towards this. There are things like confirmation bias where we've talked about cognitive dissonance before and cognitive dissonance is where this really uneasy mental tension that we feel when the facts that we're being presented with or the reality that we're facing doesn't match up with our beliefs or attitudes. And so one form of this for marketers and consumers is buyers remorse. I bought something I thought I had an idea of, I thought I knew I wanted this or needed this. Then when I receive it it's either not the quality I found or I found something else that was better, at a better price point or something like that. And so now I have this mental tension, this cognitive dissonance that is making me very uneasy. And so there's kind of two ways you deal with that. You either take your cognitive dissonance and say," Okay, now that the facts don't seem to match up with my beliefs, I need to reframe my beliefs and attitudes to match more closely with what the facts are or, and subconsciously a lot of us do this, I need to reframe these facts so they're more cohesive with what my current state of beliefs and attitudes are. And so that's what we feel. That's what we see when we see confirmation bias is, you know what? Just to be topical, we'll talk about people who are pro and anti- vax and I'm not going to get in on the politics or anything like that. But let's just say, and I've seen studies that went both ways on this. Recently there's all this content that came out in a study saying, all the thousands of people that have died within weeks of receiving the vaccine due to cardiac issues and it's a few thousand people. And so if you're, anti- vax, you're going to take that and say," Well, I'm looking at this through the lens of anti-vaxs and instead of opening myself up to all the data, I'm going to use some of this data and I'm going to use it to confirm what I already believe." And so, instead of saying," Well, a few thousand cases out of several, several millions probably is it staggering, but it still exists and it's worth consideration." But what we don't know is how many of those people were predisposed to cardiac issues without the vaccine? Is this a coincidence? Is this causative versus correlative effects? How many people, if not more would've died being exposed to the virus itself, as opposed to the vaccine for the virus? The sort of selection bias of whether this is really happening. There are a lot of big unknowns but folks will still use this data to confirm their beliefs and hence the confirmation bias. And the same thing on the other side though, is if you're vaccinated, I saw a study that came out that has staggering results for survival rates for vaccinated versus unvaccinated. And when I actually looked at numbers, what this study was showing was here are the survival rates of the vaccinated since the vaccine came out, as opposed to here are the death rates of everyone even prior to the vaccine. It was really apples versus oranges. It was not the same thing. But if you're pro- vax, you're going to look at that and say," This is staggering evidence to confirm what I already believe." Now, the one thing we do know is there's a lot of data out there, a lot of it's being skewed, regardless of where you fall on either side of that discussion, there's a confirmation bias that we're all basically prone to approach. And so it's kind of this, instead of relying on this shortcut, am I able to step back, zoom out and say," Do I have all the pieces here? Or does this really mean what I think it means?" And I won't get too much into confirmation bias. We'll actually get into that in our next episode, when we'll talk about confirmation and survivorship and some things that are a little more detailed in how marketers specifically work with this. But these are just kind of, these sort of shortcuts that can really trip us up if we allow them to. But I think being aware of them is kind of first step to saying, as marketers, as consumers or even as just everyday individuals, if I'm aware of this, I should be less prone to making errors based on these decisions. Or if I'm aware of the positive outcomes of these decisions, I can apply those and make my life easier and rely on those without needing to worry about the cognitive load and cognitive dissonance effects and things like that.

Bobby Tichy: Well, and I think that we take, as marketers or as marketing technologists, it's the same thing, there's people who believe that email is the best channel. There are people who think that mobile is the best channel. There are people who think that advertising, targeted advertising is the best channel. And there's no golden ticket, so to speak or one that's ubiquitous for everyone. It's kind of like the question of when's the best time to send an email. Well, it's based on all these different factors but if you just came from a company where you always sent your emails at 8: 00 AM, you're going to have this confirmation bias of, well, we always sent ours at 8: 00 AM so we need to do that at this next company. Or especially as we think about more advanced features within the MarTech ecosystem, specifically around AI and machine learning, that I think in a lot of scenarios, you can make an argument that it goes either way. It's just dependent upon how the particular algorithm is written because all we're doing is we're taking the data that we're feeding into this particular engine and we're allowing it to make the decision for us versus us making the decision itself. And it's totally possible for those algorithms or AI/ML to have a bias based on how it's written.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. And that's a problem is a lot of AI/ ML models come out with biases and we don't like that sometimes. Or the fact that what we want is the sort of law of least effort coinciding concept, where we want a single causative agent to be responsible for everything. I want to know that this is the one subject line in an email that's going to cover. I want to know that this is the best channel. And the fact of the matter is there's so many different contexts to consider. There's so many different users, so many different preferences. There's so many different times of day and things like that, that all of this makes an impact. And so having a single coefficient in a simple model is what we would like to have but that's never the case. Our kind of ability to bear cognitive loads is that we favor these simple models over a complex multivariate model. But to your point though, I don't know a whole lot of AI or machine learning models that rely on a singular variable as opposed to lots of different coefficients that interacted in complex ways in order to come out with what the best solution is at that point in time. It's kind of like the Occam razor is kind of a version of this. It's the simple model should probably be true but it very well might not be sometimes. We would like it to be true. The simplest explanation is hopefully the most true thing but that's also a heuristic. Occam's razor is not actually a law. It's just a heuristic. It's the thing that tells us, hey, if something's simple or could be possibly simply explained, just leave it at that.

Bobby Tichy: Is Occam's razor, a new competitor to Gillette?

Cole Fisher: That's exactly what it is.

Bobby Tichy: Oh, okay. I actually, I have no idea what it is. What is it?

Cole Fisher: Occam's razor is it's a theory on how to construct or evaluate something. It basically just says that if you have 10 different potential reasons that something could come into existence or a model could exist, the simplest one is probably correct. For instance, if I see a hole in the ground with smoke coming up and I can probably look at that and be, okay, maybe one of two things happened. Either somebody just left a campfire and put together a little bonfire, left it burning and now it's smoldering. Or this hiking ground is on top of a newly activated volcano that is underground, that nobody's known and has never existed. Technically that could I guess technically exist. It could be a hot spring about to erupt but that's probably not the case. What probably happened was, it's simply a bonfire. And so generally we say," The simplest explanation is probably the correct one." But that's also just, it's a theory. It's basically kind of a heuristic that we use to explain things. Doesn't necessarily mean it's true.

Bobby Tichy: Competitor to Gillette and Schick, that's what I got from that.

Cole Fisher: Exactly.

Bobby Tichy: Closest shave, Occum's razor, kids.

Cole Fisher: Maybe we get Occum to sponsor us.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, there you go. I like that. And we'll get into this more in some of the coming episodes but especially as we think about that process of the confirmation bias, something that we talk to a lot of folks about and what a lot of companies seem to struggle with is this whole notion of tests and experimentation and how it seems a lot of folks just fall back into what they know or how something was set up because that's how it was set up and it took a large amount of money to do that or a large amount of investment to do that and we don't want to screw with that. And so we'll get into more of those concepts as we keep going. But especially from a MarTech side of things, we see this a lot where people get caught up in their own head. And personally, I never think about it in a psychological manner. I just think about it as this company doesn't have testing and experimentation or whatever it might be as a key pillar to their marketing strategy or their marketing technology strategy. But in reality, most of the time it's some kind of a personal bias, whether that's the person developing the campaigns or at a leadership level that we're missing the boat somewhere along the line.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. There's like little example of heuristics that are woven into those types of issues. And it could be something like status quo bias, where instead of spending cognitive effort on testing every little thing and revamping my journeys regularly and revisiting and really examining what I know, I'm okay with things the way they are. And I just assume that what is status quo is fine to be where it is. Status quo bias is really crippling to innovation, creativity, testing and getting A/ B testing and really finding new solutions and learnings from what we have in front of us. At the same thing, there's also sunk cost fallacy where we irrationally, in last episode, we talked a little bit in prospect theory about some of that, the intensity and we'll get into as well time decay of what these things look like. But when we talk about sunk cost, a lot of the times we quote unquote, irrationally weigh the amount of past time and effort that's gone into something. And that keeps us from moving forward from it. We hold on to things like tech debt or old journeys or evergreen campaigns that just aren't that effective. And we can even look pragmatically at data and just say," Well, these just aren't operating as effectively as they used to." But instead of changing them or taking it out, we just say," Well, that's just that campaign. You can't compare it to new campaigns or the welcome campaigns, things like that because those just have higher metrics and engagement anyways. We've put so much into this, just leave it running." And so these are some of the heuristics and things like that, that kind of trip up marketers and provide a little bit of a pitfall instead of letting them really get the most out of what's in front of them. And so I've kind of in the next episode, we're going to get into sort of four main issues or ideas that make us error prone as marketers in terms of how we make decisions and what heuristics are involved with those. And so I won't get into them but I'll just tell you the four are, how we calculate to make certain decisions. Sometimes it's too complex or sometimes it's too subjective to be calculated and not put into objective terms. The interpretation, so how do we look at the data? Is confirmation bias being involved? Are we taking a holistic look at the data or are we framing parts of it to tell the story we think it should tell? Community, how we as marketers interact within the team or how we see consumers interacting individually versus across peer reviews and things that. And then as well, chronology. How time and time decay affects some of our decisions. Sunk cost for instance, is looking at the past but when you look at the future, how is your decision going to change? And so we'll get into things like dynamic and consistency and maybe mention a little bit about hyperbolic discounting of what basically the chronology is that consumers and even marketers, when we make a decision today about tomorrow, our tomorrow version may make a very different decision.

Bobby Tichy: Anything else we should think through as far as an overview? Setting up the next two episodes of the issues and errors but also where it can be a positive outcome for heuristics and biases?

Cole Fisher: I think the big thing is just that we kind of just need to keep in mind that heuristics are not inherently bad. In fact, if anything they're good because we require them just to be able to function properly. When we think about heuristics in that lens, it makes sense that we want to leverage them. It's just a matter of, some of these can be really pitfalls to us. And so we'll dive into a little bit of why some of these are beneficial and why some of these are not. We'll start with, I don't know if you're a good news first or a bad news first kind of guy. I like to look forward to good things so in our next episode, we'll actually talk about the pitfalls and why we make mistakes as marketers with some of these cognitive shortcuts. But then we'll get into the redeeming effect of here's all the really good things we can do and all the cool concepts to consider with some of these heuristics. And here's how we can provide better consumer experiences. Here's how your customer can benefit from some of these. Here's how you can expend less energy or even revenue and get better results from what you see in front of us using these same biases and heuristics.

Bobby Tichy: I'm definitely a bad news first person.

Cole Fisher: Oh yeah.

Bobby Tichy: Give me the good news after. But to your point, don't want to end this on a negative note where we're talking about something like confirmation bias. To your point, it allows us to function. There are a lot of positives to it too. I'm excited to jump into that. Jumping over to completely unrelated, since we're in Super Bowl season, Super Bowl must haves. And this could be anything, but well, I guess first, do you host a Super Bowl party? Do you go to someone's house? Do you sit at home by yourself?

Cole Fisher: I have hosted Super Bowl before. I think when I did, the most important thing for me was I'm right up the street from the best wings in town. I go and load up on the wings from Keystone Sports Review, which in Indianapolis are amazing wings. If you haven't been there, super divey bar, delicious food, but I load up on a ton of those wings. I feel like wing, you have to have wings for Super Bowl.

Bobby Tichy: Oh, definitely.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. If you don't have wings it's I don't know. It's like a tailgate without beer. I'm not really sure what that is. Think it's just people sitting around with water, I guess. I don't know. Super Bowl without wings is the same sort of thing. You can't have it without both. What are you? Are you a host guy?

Bobby Tichy: No. I can't even remember. I feel like I'm 87 years old sometimes. I'm trying to think of what we did last time. Oh no. Well, we did go, we watched the first half of the Super Bowl at a restaurant with a couple friends. Oh, actually I think we were at home for most of it.

Cole Fisher: Sounds raucous.

Bobby Tichy: Well, Yeah. I think we were home for most of it because Joanie fell asleep and in the second quarter and the Bucs were just demolishing the Chiefs, which couldn't have made me happier. And she woke up again in the fourth quarter and apparently she had told me to wake her up after halftime but I don't remember her saying that. And it wasn't the game, the final score was 31 to 9 so I didn't wake her up. And then apparently I was supposed to. But I do remember last year we bought, and this was just for us. I have no idea why I did this but we went to BW3s and picked up 80 wings.

Cole Fisher: That sounds awesome.

Bobby Tichy: And then earlier in the day, because we had done that earlier in the day. And then when we had gotten home, because I think we did go out. We were out with some friends for the first quarter and then we came home. I'm pretty sure I DoorDashed, another dozen wings plus pork rinds and pimento cheese.

Cole Fisher: Oh, that's pretty solid.

Bobby Tichy: I know.

Cole Fisher: No chips and dip?

Bobby Tichy: No chips and dip. Have you ever had pimento cheese?

Cole Fisher: I don't know that I have. Probably but I probably didn't ask questions when I vacuumed it into my mouth.

Bobby Tichy: Put that on your list. Pimento cheese is unbelievable. I'm pretty sure it's just cheese and mayonnaise and a couple other unhealthy ingredients but it is unbelievable, especially with pork rinds. Except with pork rinds you eat four of them and you feel like you're going to keel over and die.

Cole Fisher: With those I just wipe them on my face.

Bobby Tichy: But I think the I feel go tos are wings for sure. Wings have got to be there. Some kind of chips and dip. I really like a chili cheese dip, just a layer of cream cheese on the bottom, chili and then shredded cheese on top and you bake it for 10 minutes. Just simple.

Cole Fisher: Yeah, that sounds good. Chili cheese dip or nacho cheese or anything like that, I'm down. I figure I could make a meal out of just cheese and crackers. Actually, I definitely have before but any form of cheese and crackers, nachos and queso, so whatever it is, I could just crush that like it's going out of style.

Bobby Tichy: Oh yeah, yeah. Any kind of guacamole, hummus. I recently found Pico de Guaco, which is half pico and half guacamole and it's unbelievable. I'm sure that's not a new invention but sheltered times here on the In the Clouds podcast. But I think the other must haves are, I can't deal with someone who doesn't understand football. I can't deal with the questions. Why is it forth down? Why are they kicking the ball? Why is a touchdown six points? I just can't. I can't deal with it.

Cole Fisher: I got to go to a Colts game, not that long ago with my nephews who were seven at the time and I got to explain that. That was kind of exciting but you're right, when I'm in the Super Bowl and I'm watching it and let's be honest most of the time, my Colts aren't in it so I don't have a dog in the fight. I'm there for the commercials. I want to know who spent upwards of six mil for a 30 second spot here. I got to appreciate that.

Bobby Tichy: My hopes are pretty high for a new Dr. Rick Progressive commercial because I I've been watching the same one where they are walking through the grocery store or the one where they're going into the game where they're talking about leaving before they even get in. I'm holding out hope for one of those.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. Progressive got some good ones. I like that. That's that's part of my favorite thing is the next day is just talking about what were the favorite commercials? Because I'm just not that interested in talking about how Tom Brady probably got another Super Bowl, which he won't this year but obviously. But I like it really just going through the commercials. You get the feel good ones with the Budweiser horses or some pub.

Bobby Tichy: Oh the Clydesdales.

Cole Fisher: You got to go for the feels or you got to go for comedy.

Bobby Tichy: I don't know if it was last year or the year before, but Heinz had a commercial with nothing but dachshunds in it and they all had hot dog costumes on. It was unbelievable.

Cole Fisher: I don't remember it, but I could get along with that.

Bobby Tichy: Must not have been that memorable.

Cole Fisher: Or somebody was talking through the commercial. Which is the worst.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Although that would probably be me. I'm not that into the commercials. I'd rather watch the commercials separately from the game. Usually the commercials for me are I got to go get more chips. Well, thanks everybody for listening to In the Clouds podcast. As always, you can reach us at, intheclouds @levdigital.com. I think we've only ever gotten one email. I'm just throwing that out there. If someone could reach out to us, let us know you're listening.

Cole Fisher: And thanks for that email, Mom.

Bobby Tichy: Appreciate it. Mrs. Fisher. See you everybody.

DESCRIPTION

In the first episode of a miniseries on heuristics and biases, Bobby and Cole frame what heuristics and biases are and why marketers should care, as well as discuss some of the potential problems that arise when relying on other decision-making shortcuts.