In 1945, a man named William Sianis was kicked out of Wrigley Field, along with his beloved pet goat, Murphy, during Game 4 of the World Series. Outraged, Sianis declared, “Them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more.”
The Chicago Cubs then proceeded to not win a World Series for 71 years.
Fans, understandably, felt defeated by the goat’s curse. After 71 years of inconceivably consistent heartbreak and failure, how could they not believe in it? The greatest minds of the Cubs fandom paraded goats through Wrigley, doused the dugout with holy water, even zapped a baseball, but the curse was unwavering. Or rather, it was, until the Cubs clawed back from a three-games-to-one deficit against Cleveland to win it all in extra innings of Game 7.
As fun as superstition is, the Cubs were never cursed. In fact, their misfortune can’t even be attributed to plain old bad luck. Instead, they were stuck in a cycle of errors and missed chances.
Bad luck or bad pitches?
All too often, a B2B company’s campaign flops, and their team’s first instinct is to nebulously blame “timing” or “the market.” But here’s what we know: what looks like bad luck is almost always something you can diagnose and fix.
In the same vein, if you apply some actual scrutiny to the curse, the evidence that the Cubs were plagued by uniquely bad luck starts to crumble. The infamous Cubs’ 2003 NLCS collapse is a perfect example. They were five outs away from the World Series, but after Steve Bartman, a Chicago fan in the stands, deflected a foul ball away from the Cubs’ outfielder, Moisés Alou, robbing the team of an out. After that turning point, the Marlins scored eight runs to win the game, and eventually, the series. Was that the curse rearing its head? Or was it a bullpen that wasn’t built to hold a lead and a team that crumbled when the pressure spiked?
Digital campaigns stumble the same way. The creative might shine in the brief, and maybe the targeting seems rock-solid. But when performance starts falling, it’s not about back luck—it’s about a lack of measurement, optimization and agility.
Your campaign will foul up at some point.
At HexaGroup, we don’t buy into cursed campaigns. Instead, we take destiny into our own hands and engineer results with proven best practices, relentless monitoring, unmatched domain expertise, and moves driven by data. Our live integrated dashboards pull every channel and tactic together, so nothing slips by.
When a campaign sputters, it’s our job to be the tough coach who can stop a blown lead. We dive into the mechanics: Are we reaching the right ICP? Is the messaging misaligned with buyer intent? Is the channel mix stale? From rapid A/B testing on messaging and creative refreshes to agile budget reallocations and refreshed creative, we make real-time adjustments based on performance signals—not gut feelings.
How did the Cubs finally get it done in 2016? They put together a better team and made disciplined decisions over several years. Simply put, they played better when they needed to. Jason Heyward’s speech in the weight room during a rain delay in Game 7 didn’t hurt either. Sometimes the right message at the right moment changes everything.
Optimization turns close losses into wins.
Every struggling campaign has a Steve Bartman moment. That’s to say, there will always be a single point in a digital campaign where things can go sideways. Maybe it’s a landing page that isn’t converting or an email sequence that isn’t nurturing who it should.
The mistake is blaming that hiccup, the Steve Bartman, for everything. The right move is to move on and engineer a system that prevents mistakes from becoming season-enders.
That’s where HexaGroup’s Growth Engine comes in. It connects your inbound marketing, ABM, and 360-degree digital advertising into a unified, measurable ecosystem. With smart KPIs and robust tracking set up at every stage, you catch weak links before your campaign ROI takes a hit. Optimization isn’t an easy homerun; it’s the continual tactical adjustments that turn close losses into wins.
71 years is too long to wait for a fix.
The Cubs finally broke through when they stopped focusing on magic and started growing something real. Your digital campaigns deserve the same approach.
No goats required.
How we do digital marketing >
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