Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 13

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week:The Long View by Richard Fisher

What will it take to transform the way the world views time? Richard Fisher, a senior journalist with BBC Global News, explores this question and shares ways to expand our minds into deeper time scales in his book The Long View. While it seems like this would be a book just about time, what’s fascinating about Fisher’s writing and research is that he looks at it from many different dimensions. In this wide-ranging book you’ll learn about linguistics, architecture, global cultures and why the way...

This Genetic Engineering Startup Wants to Make Fluorescent Bunnies and Actual Unicorns

In case you needed more life imitating fiction, a startup known as The Los Angeles Project is using gene editing to experiment with doing some “crazy” things to animals—including making glow-in-the-dark rabbits, cats that are hypo-allergenic and maybe, one day, actual unicorns. As founder and biohacker Josie Zayner says, “I think, as a human species, it’s kind of our moral prerogative to level up animals.” The actual motto of the company from their website and social media is “We Build Life.”

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Open AI Launched a New Brand Look and Expensive Super Bowl Ad … Made by Humans

Open AI has launched a cohesive new brand identity and look which was also featured in their first Super Bowl Ad last week. The campaign was developed by an in-house team led by a former Creative Director from Mercedes-Benz and includes work from Berlin-based type foundry ABC Dinamo and motion partner Studio Dumbar in Rotterdam. The branding looks excellent and has been getting strong reviews amongst marketing and design critics as well. It’s also inspiring a decent amount of ironic observations...

What Meta’s Latest Effort to Help Kids Spot Predators Really Tells Us

There is a question that journalists learn to consider often which we should all get better at asking: why now? Any time a story crosses their orbit and they consider writing about it, one of the most fundamental questions they will often start from is trying to understand the timing behind the story. This week Meta announced a “fully fanded” curriculum to teach middle schoolers how to recognize forms of online exploitation, such as sextortion scams and grooming.

This is not a new problem...

The Secret of Startup Success Might Be Who Is Willing to Lose Money the Longest

Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Uber … all dominant players in their industry. What if the secret to their success is just that they were all willing to lose money for longer than any of their competitors? An article I read this week suggested that perhaps the ten year journeys of both Netflix and Hulu to now finally become profitable was largely due to their leadership’s willingness to keep losing money until eventually they would make it back. This was famously the strategy behind Jeff Bezos launchi...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: How To Winter by Dr. Kari Leibowitz

February is notorious for being the toughest month of the year for many people. In the Northern hemisphere, these are the cold winter months where social isolation feels at its highest and depression sets in for many people. Whether this describes you these months or not, How to Winter is a book about how to overcome this mindset and find the positivity to lift your mood and “thrive on cold, dark or difficult days.”

To write this book, the author Kari Leibowitz traveled around the world ...

Is This the Age of the Obscured Brand Logo?

There was a longstanding joke among my agency friends about the type of feedback we would often get from corporate clients when presenting our creative work. It essentially boiled down to some version of “make the logo bigger.” Brand managers and CMOs alike have long equated a prominent logo with brand building and, by extension, effective marketing. Lately, there are signs this may be shifting.

Marketing publication The Drum recently reported on brands who are “confidently disguising their l...

The Super Bowl Halftime Show Went Over Many People’s Heads. Here’s What It Meant …

Recently it seems like stories about social media often center on the negative impact of various platforms making it easy to spread misinformation, fuel hate or generally inspire an ever-present sense of insecurity about ourselves. This week I was reminded of one of the upsides of social media … the ability to share perspectives worth spreading.

The Super Bowl halftime was a hot topic for online discussion. Most of it centered around whether you “got it” or not. The show had lots of cultural ...

Are Book Blurbs Worth the Effort or a Tradition That “Rewards Connections Over Talent”?

By any measure, I’ve been pretty successful at getting book blurbs across my ten published books. Deepak Chopra. Tony Robbins. Adam Grant. They have all done book blurbs for me in the past and with my last book Non-Obvious Thinking, we went out big on blurbs—collecting more than 50 of them from a collection of visionary authors, business leaders, innovators. It was time consuming, humbling and according to a new article from this week’s NY Times, maybe a total waste of time.

According to ...

The Intrigue and Lessons of Canceled TV Shows and Abandoned Pilots

I find the idea of canceled TV programs to be intriguing. I always have. It’s not that I enjoy reading about the creative misfortune of people having their ideas crushed after a depressingly small window of time to prove themselves “worthy.” The process to even get a show concept green lit, filmed, edited and then aired is so difficult that I can’t help wondering what happens to those ideas after they get killed?

The world of TV is filled with accidental success stories (fans hated the first ...