critical thinking Tag

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Marketing Professor… Do marketing plans come from factory assembly lines these days? The advice is so generic and commodified, someone on AliExpress must be selling it for 40-cents a piece as long as you buy 100 of them. Take this article about marketing the L.A. Rams NFL franchise. It contains two words that would make most experienced marketers groan in weariness: The S-Word: Social Media The M-Word: Millennials Those two words were a running gag in my Marketing Strategy course. IfRead More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + LinkedIn Purist… The neighborhood is slowly deteriorating. Not my physical one in L.A., which is gentrifying so fast even the pigeons have to take out loans to eat.Read More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Marketing Communication Professor… Add another voice to the growing chorus of marketers stating the inconvenient truth — a truth that social media cheerleaders still refuse to acknowledge: When it comes to marketing brands, organic social media is a colossal waste of time.Read More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Marketing Analyst… Add “effective” to the list of marketing terms that no longer mean anything, alongside “authentic,” “leader,” “revolutionary,” “disruptive,” and “engagement.” According to a misdirected study by research firm Ace Metrix, in 2014 Samsung had 7 of the 15 “most effective” ads in the tech hardware sector, including the top 2. Of course, as everyone knows, Samsung had a terrible year, with third-quarter profits down 60% to three-year lows. Also on Ace Metrix’s top 15 list: Amazon’s ad for itsRead More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Guy Who Questions the Answers… A recent class discussion brought up one of my core tenets: the need to question everything in the market. We were discussing Charity: Water, a nonprofit that achieved near celebrity status because of its use of social media and videos: Great ad, right? When asked to analyze why the video worked, a student described it as “authentic” and “transparent” — two clichés now so overused, misused, and abused that they no longer have meaning. Analysts needRead More

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC + Social Media Evaluator I’m waiting for my payment of $138,552.96. I’m not sure who’s supposed to pay me, but I know the exact amount. According to the article “What’s the Value of a Tweet?” by the consulting firm SumAll, the “revenue generated from a business tweet” is $25.62. Since my Twitter account is entirely business, and I’ve tweeted 5,408 times as of today, I should get a six-figure windfall. And that’s not counting the revenue from each retweet ($20.37)…Read More

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC + Guy Who Likes To Question The Answers I used to read and recommend eMarketer, simply because they have numbers and pie charts and other examples of statisticulation. That made their articles seem more rational and realistic than 98.76%* of the blogposts written by social media gurus, who like to turn their personal whims and opinions into “10 rules for this” and “20 best practices for that” with no data to substantiate their arguments whatsoever. But this morning I came acrossRead More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Guy Who Questions The Numbers; photo via Wikimedia Commons… Imagine that you own a basketball team, and you send your talent scout out to find a new player. He comes back and presents two options: Player A: averages 9 points a game, including 1 three-point basket per game Player B: averages 24 points a game, including an average of 2 three-point baskets per game Both play the same number of minutes per game, and both want the same amount of money.Read More

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Practicing Skeptic; photo of uncut industrial diamond ready for hyping by Shieldforyoureyes Dave Fischer… I once met this millionaire who made his fortune selling diamond jewelry through supermarket tabloids. What kind of jewelry sells through the cheesiest rags on the planet — newspapers you wouldn’t dare use to line a birdcage lest you kill the bird? These were genuine diamonds — genuine industrial diamonds, that is, worthless in the general jewelry market. Yet the tabloid readers saw the word “diamond” andRead More

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Guy Who Likes to Question the Answers So I’m reading an article in Inc., my favorite zine for advice on entrepreneurial matters, when I found this statement about one company’s social media campaign: “So far, about 7 percent of Step2’s customers have registered on the company’s website with their Facebook IDs, and of those who have, more than half of them have shared product reviews with their Facebook friends. In the past year, traffic from Facebook has increased 135 percent andRead More