Enough with the Fluff! A Recession is No Time for Management B.S.

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder & Fusion Director, Atomic Tango LLC

"My hit HBO series is over, and my stock portfolio is worth dirt, and you're telling me to 'be resilient'?!"

Pass the paper bag, I’ve got emotion sickness.

I’m perusing Harvard Business Publishing’s website, and a headline snags my eye: “Use the Downtown to Your Advantage“. Hmm, that sounds compelling. What kind of killer advice could the gurus of Harvard Business bestow upon us mere mortals?

What I subsequently read makes my eyes roll like rubber dice on a craps table in a 6.7 earthquake.

Just Break ‘Em: Not So Cool Rules in Marketing and Media

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder & Fusion Director, Atomic Tango LLC

For all our talk of freedom, we Americans LOVE rules…

• Our favorite sport, football, has the most rules of any sport on the planet.

• Poker players make up new rules with every hand (“threes and hearts are wild except for the Queen, which you can pass to the right if someone sneezes during play”).

• Our institutionalized belief systems — whether Rastafarianism, environmentalism, or even Libertarianism — bristle with rules of what can and can’t be done.

• The August issue of Wired features an entire section on rules, “How to Behave: New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans,” which includes a few illuminating ones by Brad Pitt (“Don’t take a picture of your wife’s butt. That’s silly. Take pictures of other people’s wives’ butts.”).

• And, of course, as its name indicates, this here blog occasionally lays out rules for marketing and media as laid down by a higher authority (me).

Want more proof that most of us are rule-snorting junkies? Take this here Internet, where many users routinely cry “net neutrality!” and “information is free!” and “hands off, Feds!” — YET first-comers to any new website, network or medium are quick to impose rules that newbies must follow or die.

Black and White and Dead All Over: Can Journalism Survive Free Riders?

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder & Fusion Director, Atomic Tango LLC

Yeah, try re-bottling that. (illustration by Stuart MacKay-Smith)

It’s tough watching an old friend slowly die. Even tougher knowing that you’re helping to knock him off.

Before you go calling 911, the old friend I’m referring to is my daily newspaper. For decades, I’ve started every day with my morning paper. I score my sports and business fix while downing pure Colombian full-caf. Over the years, the two addictions have chemically intertwined to enhance their combined effects. Consequently, whenever I miss my morning coffee-n-paper jumpstart, I find myself fluttering from activity to activity the rest of the day like a fat pigeon in a hurricane.

And now, to my horror and profound sadness, newspapers are dying, losing readers and advertisers to the Web. As a blogger, I contribute to this lethal migration, not so much by stealing readers from newspapers (if only I had such drawing power), but by validating the Web as the place to go for scoop. I myself drink deeply from this vast sea of instant info. After all, why read papers for business alerts or sports scores when they’re updated every second online?

The Brand is the Result: In Defense of Image-Only Advertising

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder & Fusion Director, Atomic Tango LLC

I couldn’t resist the bait.

A direct marketing guy on LinkedIn posed the following question:

“Why don’t most advertising agencies pay as much attention to results as they do to their creative and the awards that they can achieve?… Don’t get me wrong, I believe that branding is important to a company, but feel like you can do both at once and achieve much more. … Respectfully, please help me in understanding why clever creative, especially on the Internet, is the basis of awards instead of client results.”

String Up the Velvet Ropes! Why Social Networks Need Barriers

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder & Fusion Director, Atomic Tango LLC

L.A. contains miles of velvet ropes that pack more protective power than the Great Wall of China. They’re fronted by large scowling men armed with high-caliber clipboards. And they’re assaulted nightly by swarms of wannabes, who are then repelled by blatant acts of discrimination based strictly on looks…

“Free” Market Freefall: The End of Free?

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder & Fusion Director, Atomic Tango LLC

Web 2.Uh-Oh

Just over a year ago, Wired magazine proudly proclaimed that the future would be free, an argument based partially on ad-supported free sites like NYTimes.com. Of course, it was hard to take this manifesto seriously since Wired still charges for their magazine (cover price $4.99).

It was also misleading because it appeared during the height of the second dotcom bubble, when most of the free websites and services weren’t really living off their ad revenue. Some still aren’t. The New York Times website, for example, couldn’t exist in its current form without the financial and content support from its parent company.

More Elections! The Cure for the Common Recession

Word came out that erstwhile Presidential candidate Mitt Romney spent $42.3 million of his own money on his failed campaign. My thought? Cool — it couldn’t have come at a better time, what with the economy looking like something my cat coughed up…

Amen to That: A Little Gospel According to Peter Drucker

While reading an article by one of my marketing idols, Jack Trout, I came across this quote from the “father of business consulting,” Peter Drucker…

Spicoli Rules: The Origin of Cool Rules Pronto

“If we don’t get some cool rules pronto, we’ll be bogus, too!”
– Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli, Fast Times at Ridgemont High

It was one of those seminal Big Bang moments in pop culture: a single work that launched careers and trends while capturing the ‘tude of a whole generation. The 1982 film Fast Times At Ridgemont High featured Sean Penn in a breakout role that spawned hundreds of Hollywood slackers, from Bill & Ted, to Beavis & Butthead, to most of the characters in Jud Apatow’s recent movies. Penn’s Jeff Spicoli wore checkerboard Vans sneakers, turning them into instant icons. And the screenplay was written by Cameron Crowe, who went on to write and direct other culture shaping films, including Say Anything and Jerry Maguire. With all the pieces in place, Fast Times was crude, adolescent, shallow, and pure creative genius.

Now, a quarter-of-a-century later, I’ve created this marketing-and-media blog named after the film’s most quotable line, which is a joint-production of both Crowe and Penn. Crowe’s original script reads, “If we don’t come up with some cool rules ourself…”; Penn then swaps in the oh-so-critical “pronto” for “ourself,” demonstrating the inestimable value of a single word.

My goal with this blog is to promote other acts of pure inspiration in an increasingly cluttered mediascape, with a focus on advertising and marketing. The marketspace is currently enjoying new works of genius by the likes of GEICO, Apple and ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. At the same time, we’re enduring senseless acts of bogusness perpetrated by the likes of Wal-Mart, my beloved Democratic Party (sigh), and most of the so-called marketing execs in Silicon Valley.

I will be brutally critical, I will be tongue in cheek, I will be anything but professional in my search for other “cool rules” in marketing and media. Note that these are not “best practices,” to be followed or imitated; they are simply examples of brilliance that will hopefully inspire more seminal Big Bang moments in pop culture. While we can’t all be as culturally influential as Jeff Spicoli and the rest of the Fast Times crew, we should at least give it one hell of a shot… pronto.