The Wilt Chamberlain Effect: Why Marketers Abandon What Works

The Greatest Night in Basketball History

In 1962, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a single NBA game, a record that has never been matched. But there is a detail about that night most people overlook. Chamberlain, who was famously terrible at free throws, made 28 out of 32 attempts. An 87.5% success rate. The reason? For that game, he shot them underhand, what players mocked as the 'granny shot.' As Patrick Gilbert recounts in Never Always, Never Never, Chamberlain had experimented with this technique earlier in the season and seen his percentages rise dramatically. On the night he scored 100, it worked better than ever. And yet, immediately afterward, he abandoned it. Chamberlain admitted years later that he felt 'silly, like a sissy' shooting that way. He knew it was wrong to give it up, but the social pressure was stronger than the data. He chose pride over effectiveness. One of the greatest athletes in history, on the greatest night of his career, found something that demonstrably made him better and walked away from it. Not because it stopped working. Not because he found something better. Because it made him feel uncomfortable. He had the data in his hands, literally, and it was not enough.

Enjoying this? Never Always, Never Never goes much deeper into the mental models and decision frameworks that shape how we think.

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The Marketing Version of the Granny Shot

Patrick Gilbert argues that marketers make the same mistake every day. The evidence base is overwhelming. Emotional advertising works. Building brand equity drives long-term profit. Integrating brand and performance delivers stronger results than keeping them siloed. Decades of research from Les Binet, Peter Field, Byron Sharp, and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have proven it. Modern data has confirmed it repeatedly. Yet most marketers continue to default to what feels safer: optimizing for short-term metrics, sticking to rigid structures, ignoring the evidence that their brand campaigns can sell and their performance campaigns can build brand. Gilbert illustrates this with a global apparel brand he worked with. The company had two separate teams, two separate Meta ad accounts, and two very different goals. When AdVenture Media's marketing mix model proved that brand campaigns were driving direct sales and performance campaigns were building brand equity, the findings challenged every assumption that justified the existing structure. The VP of Paid Media listened carefully. He did not push back on the logic. He admitted it was fascinating and made perfect sense. And then he said, in effect: restructuring a multinational marketing team is not in my job description. This is above my pay grade. Can you show me how this model works within the current campaign structure? Nobody doubted the data. But nobody was willing to change either. That is the Wilt Chamberlain Effect in a corporate setting. The evidence is clear, and the organization still cannot act on it because the proven approach requires uncomfortable structural change.

Why the Effect Is So Persistent

The Wilt Chamberlain Effect persists because the forces that sustain it are structural, not just psychological. Within organizations, incentive systems reward visible, measurable outcomes. Short-term ROAS is easy to report, easy to justify, and easy to claim credit for. Long-term brand building effects are harder to attribute, slower to materialize, and impossible to tie to any single person's performance review. The careers that advance are the ones with clear metrics attached to them. Advocating for approaches whose benefits take years to compound is a career risk. Between organizations, the same dynamic plays out between clients and agencies. When an agency's survival depends on producing attributable short-term results, their incentives drift toward whatever is easiest to measure and claim credit for. Even if the agency knows that a different approach would serve the client better, recommending it means recommending something that is harder to prove, slower to show results, and more likely to get the agency fired before the benefits materialize. And within the broader industry, convention creates its own gravity. When everyone in your peer group is running performance-only strategies with tight ROAS targets, proposing something different feels risky even when the evidence supports it. The arbitrage era trained an entire generation of marketers to think a certain way. Unlearning those habits requires not just intellectual agreement but the organizational courage to act on it. The question Patrick Gilbert poses is direct: are you doing the same thing Wilt did? Do you have the evidence in your hands and still choose pride over effectiveness?

Wilt knew the underhand shot made him great. He knew abandoning it would hold him back. And still, he walked away from it. The question is: are you doing the same?

Patrick Gilbert, Never Always, Never Never

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