• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, July 24, 2014

Yvonne Abt, VP, partner, portfolio management at UM Worldwide, just gave the most unlikely advice at OMMA RTB in LA: Stop eating the burritos.

She shared a story about her husband losing weight by going to the gym ... or so he thought. It turns out he was losing weight because he stopped eating burritos, but he thought it was because he was going to the gym.

So what does this have to do with marketing? Abt’s point was that marketers need to be careful about assuming too much.

“We assume if a [client] is within five miles of a movie theatre, they’re going to buy a ticket,” she said. Obviously, that’s not always true. The advice applies to audience-buying via programmatic, too. Marketers may assume they know exactly where consumers are going next and what they are going to buy next, but perhaps they are asking the wrong questions. Or maybe their audience-targeting is working ... by accident.

In other words, marketers need to stop eating the burritos and ask the right questions.