"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. (more…)
Hollywood is experiencing a “Freaky Friday” that’s lasting all summer — and perhaps beyond.
In the 1976 movie “Freaky Friday,” a mother and daughter magically swap bodies. After a series of icky moments milked for laughs, they predictably come to understand and respect each other.
Now, unpredictably, the entire movie industry is experiencing a similar switcheroo.
"I write business books for a living. What do you do?"
I’m pissed. I just read one of the dullest business books ever — and I’ve read some pretty awful ones, including a few that I think are actually alien invasion plans written in code. You know, like anything written by economist N. Gregory Mankiw. He’s the guy who advised Bush on the economy, and reading one of his books is like chewing a sheet of tin foil. Mankiw’s baffling prose and Earth-inappropriate ideas lead me to suspect that he’s really a Klingon. Though I’m just guessing. (more…)
I finally got around to watching the first season of “True Blood” on DVD — yeah, I know, I’m a total TV slacker — but I survived only four episodes.
“True Blood” begins with an intriguing level of satire that quickly devolves into soap operatics and — even worse — boring stereotypes. Creator Alan Ball cleverly uses vampires to symbolize the coming out of the gay community, but his vampires are clichéd, smug and brooding. Rather than being high-minded immortals espousing centuries of amassed wisdom, they’re self-indulgent fetishists living solely for debauchery. Yawn. If vampires are supposed to represent the gay community, Ball is doing the latter a great disservice. Indeed, with the exception of the leading romantic interest, most of the vampires are hyper-violent dicks, so I actually found myself siding with the bigots: uh, yeah, it’s probably not the best idea to mingle with superpowered creatures hell bent on eating you. (more…)
A few days ago, Microsoft leaked a new ad for Internet Explorer 8 — though I’m not sure if “leaked” is the right verb for it. More like spilled, yakked up, upchucked, and Technicolor yawned it. The ad is nicknamed “OMGIGP,” which stands for “Oh My God I’m Gonna Puke.” Really. No kidding. And it actually has a woman vomiting in it. Think I’m jesting? Watch for yourself — if you can… (more…)
Score one for the Iranian protesters — at least when it comes to marketing.
Just last week, the Iranian protests dominated conversations across the media and the Internet. Then yesterday, not at all surprisingly in our celebrity-obsessed culture, Michael Jackson’s death wiped the Iranians off the evening news, the front pages of newspapers, and the social media trending topics.
Ahmadinejad couldn’t have asked for anything better. (more…)
Since I love teaching and talking about marketing, friends often ask why I don’t get a PhD. I’ll think about it… and then I stumble upon an example of the actual work perpetrated by PhD’s in my field… (more…)
"A TV series based on 'Blade Runner.' Really, is that too much to ask? But no, you give us 'Real Housewives of Orange County' instead... Time to die!"
When “Battlestar Galactica” concluded, its fans lamented that the series had to end, but were thrilled that it departed on a good note. Compare that to the fans of “Lost,” who are saying “WTF?!” after its later episodes. Then there are the still-hurting fans of “Firefly,” who saw Joss Whedon’s brilliant series nipped in the bud by a network that seemed intent on destroying it. (The subsequent “Firefly”-based movie, “Serenity,” helped alleviate the pain. A little.) Whedon’s next experience with “Dollhouse” drove him from TV for good. And, of course, there’s “Star Trek,” that short-lived 60s series that’s been born again in movie theaters thanks to the man behind “Lost”… (more…)
Intrigued by the Ed Hardy wines at his local Whole Foods, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Dan Neil performed exploratory surgery on that insatiable branding machine Christian Audigier. The resulting L.A. Times article is a brilliant and funny study of branding gone wild… (more…)
Sometimes, amidst all the talk of bank bailouts and business banality, I stumble across something that melts away all the jagged cynical edges, one note at a time… (more…)
Business professors love to dis popular business books, like the silly but frighteningly successful Who Moved My Cheese? We criticize them as lacking proper research and analysis and being the business-publishing equivalent of McDonald’s combo meals. They’re tasty and easy to swallow — which is fine if you’re trapped at the airport — but if you rely on them for sustenance, you’re destined to crash… (more…)
When I was a kid, the object of all crayon lust was the Crayola 64 box with the built-in sharpener, because a dull crayon was almost as bad as soggy Cocoa Pebbles. And yet, that Crayola 64 contained some bizarre colors like Maize, Burnt Sienna and the fun-to-say-but-rarely-used Raw Umber.* While Black was quickly worn to a stub — one could never have enough Black — Maize lasted longer than the Shredded Wheat that mom tried to get us to eat in place of Cocoa Pebbles. (Sorry, mom, miniature bales of hay are for miniature horses.)
The point of this contrived metaphor? Just because a color exists doesn’t mean you have to use it. The same holds true for new media like Twitter… (more…)
To prep for a video I’m producing, I watched Undead or Alive, the 2007 comedy-horror flick about zombies in the old west. It’s moderately entertaining, with Chris Kattan as a cowboy wannabe and Navi Rawat as the intellectual kung-fu fighting Native-American babe. The hitch in this giddyap? The zombies themselves. Although they have more dialogue than most zombies (better agents, perhaps?), they’re still just another iteration of the lumbering brain eaters who have populated every zombie flick since Night of the Living Dead. Not exactly scary. I’d be more terrified to find a stray pitbull approaching me on a city street. Or Ann Coulter.
It's everything but a floor wax or a dessert topping...
Now here’s a site that takes borrowed interest to a new extreme.
The Pomegranate Phone is an all-in-one device that makes the iPhone look like a hockey puck. It’s got it all: web surfing, MP3 player, video projector, voice translator… Sounds pretty cool, right? Then, of course, there’s the built-in coffee maker, harmonica, and a shaver for eliminating those pesky five o’clock shadows… (more…)
I don’t usually go to FoxNews.com, but today — October 24 — I wanted to see what they had to say about the mugging hoax by a McCain volunteer. Instead, I found the following top national headlines:
Hmmm, isn’t there like an economic crash, two wars, and — what do you call it? — oh, yeah, a Presidential election going on?
Meanwhile, the top two stories over at NationalEnquirer.com are about Cindy McCain and Joe Biden.
If ignorance is bliss, then Fox News is the happiest place on earth.
You gotta love asterisks* — those little stars that tell you some juicy bits of information are lying far from the statement you just read. The late great novelist David Foster Wallace turned the footnote into a powerful literary tool; “notes and errata” make up nearly 100 pages of his 1079-page novel Infinite Jest, and they’re as compelling to read as the main body of the novel itself.
Then I got a massive jest of sorts from Discover Card in my mailbox… (more…)
These days, it’s a luxury just to have a job you can hate… “What, you’ve got a steady gig with health insurance? Hell, if you don’t like it, let me have it and I’ll hate it for you…” So maybe the timing isn’t exactly right for a book on dealing with career discontentment.
Then again, maybe now is the perfect time for The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, because all these layoffs are giving millions of people a moment to consider, what the hell am I doing with my life? If you fall into that category (employed or unemployed), you might want to read on… (more…)
Ever watch a horror film and yell at the characters, “What the hell are you doing?!” Well, smarty, now you can put yourself in the characters’ bloody shoes with the online zombie flick The Outbreak… (more…)
My friend Nalts, a top YouTube director and marketing whiz, found this brilliant spoof of focus groups:
Tip of the thinking cap to TheIdeaGroup for creating this video. My only criticism is that I didn’t think of making this myself. (BTW, why is everything funnier with a British accent?)
Focus groups have notoriously rejected minivans, Seinfeld, and telephone answering machines. (“What do I need a machine to answer my phone for? I’m perfectly happy doing it myself…”) They’re statistically irrelevant — indeed, statistically worthless — and the participants are under huge “group think” pressure to conform. In fear of making a mistake, participants tend to favor the familiar and reject the unusual. That spells doom for innovation.
Yet, because focus groups are “scientifically” conducted by overpaid consultants in controlled environments, people take their feedback seriously. I’d rather conduct one-on-one interviews with each person, with the goal to determine their needs and issues.
The first season of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” wrapped up last week. (If you missed any of it, Fox offers entire episodes on its rich multimedia promo site.) T-tv did fulfill its mission of entertaining young males and, ahem, some middle-aged ones during Monday Night Football’s cruel hiatus. But it left far too many questions — and I’m not talking about what will happen next season…
"Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake at addition, but it's always someone else's money he's adding up."
- Raymond Chandler
Let's hear it for uncommon sense: that inner itch that inspires you to stray from the herd, ditch the training wheels and leap into the fast lane. As we all know, it's the risk takers who get their faces on the cover of Wired magazine and their words on National Public Radio. No one ever remembers who won "honorable mention"...
Cool Rules Pronto celebrates uncommon sense in marketing and media. It's written by Freddy J. Nager, the Founder & Fusion Director of the L.A.-based marketing agency and production company Atomic Tango. For Cool Rules Pronto, he draws on two decades of experience in advertising and entertainment, including 15 years in new media. He has created campaigns and projects for agencies Saatchi & Saatchi and Magnet Interactive, and for such clients as Toyota, MCA Records, National Lampoon, Nissan & Infiniti, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, the NFL on Fox and numerous startups.
Freddy also serves on the Board of Directors of City Garage Theatre in Santa Monica, California. He holds a BA from Harvard University and an MBA from USC (go Trojans!), and currently teaches marketing through Antioch University L.A. and the University of Wales/Robert Kennedy College. He also wrote the satirical book, Claw Your Way To The Top: Ten Things I Learned About Business From My Cat, which he'll get around to marketing someday.
Hollywood is experiencing a “Freaky Friday” that’s lasting all summer — and perhaps beyond.
Since I love teaching and talking about marketing, friends often ask why I don’t get a PhD. I’ll think about it… and then I stumble upon an example of the actual work perpetrated by PhD’s in my field… 
Sometimes, amidst all the talk of bank bailouts and business banality, I stumble across something that melts away all the jagged cynical edges, one note at a time… 
The first season of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” wrapped up last week. (If you missed any of it, Fox offers entire episodes on its 
