1 ticket over! No...way!

“1 ticket over! No...way!” 🤯

This week, Gupta Media revealed a new brand and new tagline: Redefining Possible.

When I look back on 9 years with the agency and think about what Redefining Possible means, my first thought immediately goes to the time that Gogi Gupta and I built our most accurate model ever.

If you work in data, you see this famous quote all the time: “All models are wrong, but some are useful” (George E. P. Box).

In the final months before the 2018 Governors Ball Music Festival, Tom Russell and Laura Hymes of Founders Entertainment wanted to know how many tickets we thought the festival would end up selling when it was all said and done. Tens of thousands of tickets were going to sell. Millions of dollars in revenue. How can we see into the future and know? We're just an ad agency, right?

“We need a model.”

Gogi and I were tracking ticket sales every hour and had data from past years of Gov Ball and other festivals. We had what we needed to make a useful model. We had done this before, many times. So we built one and it gave us a number. A final ticket sales forecast.

The day after the festival wrapped up and the sales were finalized, we looked at the ticket count. Our model forecasted 1 ticket fewer than was actually sold.

99.999% accurate. 🎯

I don’t think we’ll ever recreate a model that accurate. But that is what Redefining Possible can mean to a data guy. A dart throw (one backed by experience, intuition, and long Excel formulas) can be a bullseye.

The funny thing is the quote is still true.

Our model was wrong. It was 1 off!

But in this case, I would like to propose a new saying: “All models are wrong and some are useful, but a few are VERY useful.”