ethics Tag

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Influencer Marketing Instructor; photo from the LIDA agency ad campaign for the Jeff Koons rabbit sculpture… The following is the text of a speech I gave May 23 at an Influencers Industry Social Mixer sponsored by Erka Media. Once upon a time there lived two kings whose wealth was counted in the billions…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 Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + No Fan of Captain Ahab… How does one of the hottest restaurants in town go completely out of business in just weeks? That’s what happened to The Hump, a trendy sushi joint in Santa Monica, California, that shut down after getting busted for selling (get this) whale meat. That’s right: someone there actually said, “Mmm, beautiful, intelligent, and endangered species — let’s serve it for dinner.”Read More

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC + Occasional Chiseler Warning: The following blog post contains full frontal liberal snarking and might not be appropriate for all audiences. If you’re a Republican with a thin skin, please escape now to somewhere you might feel more at home. The way I see it, ridiculing Sarah Palin is not only fun, it’s our patriotic duty. Many of us laugh at her now, viewing Palin as a living Saturday Night Live sketch. But the scary part is that many others takeRead More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Crabcake Junkie; photo by Stu Spivack via Wikimedia Commons… In my ongoing quest to find anything of value on Twitter, I started following Umair Haque, a strategy advisor who writes for Harvard Business Publishing. Haque recently blasted someone else’s article: “i strongly rec everyone read https://bit.ly/GdroN and reflect on why its 1) bad business 2) ethically questionable + 3) lame.” That micro-rant sounded like something I’d write, so I checked the offending article out…Read More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Kool-Aid Abstainer; featured photo by Les Anderson on Unsplash… Multilevel marketing (MLM) is the business equivalent of cigarette smoking: technically legal, extremely lucrative for its corporate overlords, and lethally addictive for millions of people worldwide, even though it’s ultimately bad for them. The big difference between MLM and cigarettes: MLM doesn’t come with a warning label. So as an Atomic Tango public service, I’m writing this big fat warning label for MLM (aka “network marketing”), which is one kind of marketingRead More