Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 29

What If Award Winning Ads from Cannes Became Open Source for Anyone to Use?

This week is the Cannes Creative Festival and so there are plenty of the usual healthy jokes about Cannes being a yacht-party fueled satire of itself. Criticism aside, awards have always been meaningful to celebrate great work and motivate creative people … but the problem is that in past years most Cannes award-winning campaigns quickly seem to disappear. As McCann Worldgroup Chief Strategy Officer Jitender Dabas explains:

“Celebrated ideas frequently get shelved. Creators chase the next big...

Scent Camera Recreates Travel Smells and More Core77 Design Award Winners

For the 12th year, the Core 77 Design Awards have spanned 22 categories and showcased product, branding and conceptual ideas from students and professionals imagining solutions to global challenges. This year’s range of winners span from shape-shifting fabric concepts to speculative design of a dystopian capitalist future. The entire site and descriptions of winners is the very definition of a rabbit hole so beware of the full list of award winners as it can very quickly turn into a time-consumi...

Psychedelic Treatment for PTSD Sees a Setback with FDA Rejection

Despite years of promising results with using psychedelic treatments to help people with conditions such as depression or PTSD, the treatment finally saw its day in front of the FDA. It didn’t go well. Citing concerns about safety, the FDA rejected the use of psychedelics to treat PTSD.

While the rejection is a serious setback for the promising pace of psychedelic research, the main reason for the rejection is even more interesting. Typically, a drug is tested through a series of controlled b...

A Surprisingly Diabolical Marketing Strategy: Flip Your Competitor’s Brand Spokesperson

Joey Chestnut is about as modern of an American hero as you can imagine. He is a household name for being the 16-time champion of Nathan’s hot dog eating competition. Nathan’s even considered him an unofficial brand spokesperson … until they found out he took a sponsorship deal with Impossible Foods to promote their vegan hot dogs. Now he’s banned from the competition unless he renounces his allegiance with the vegan dogs.

The whole media firestorm is generating some brilliant PR for Impossib...

What the Disappearing Dining Room Reveals About American Culture

There is a room in my house that is known by everyone as the “Thanksgiving Room.” According to the blueprints for the house, it was originally designed to be a dining room — but its revised name reflects its utility. Used mainly once in November for actual dining, the rest of the year it is never used that way. Instead, it’s an organizing table for large book mailings, or a worktable for curating trends that I’ll write about, or some other family project.

The waning need for a room specifica...

Why the Titan Submersible Sub Tragedy Is One We Can’t Look Away From

It has been nearly a year since the OceanGate Titan submersible submarine imploded, killing its five passengers which included Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate. The details that emerged in the aftermath of the disaster painted a tale of overconfidence, ill-advised cost-cutting and plenty of ignored warning signs and safety messages.

This week WIRED magazine published a long exposé featuring new details that are even more disturbing. Yet much of the following commentary and coverage seems to b...

A Promise to Graduates with “No Promise”

During these weeks of graduation, you are probably seeing lots of commencement speeches hit the web. They are filled with advice about how young people can fulfill their dreams, discover what they want to do next and achieve their potential. This weekend, there was an op-ed in the NY Times that offered a different perspective,
 reaching out to the high school underperformers. The kids who may have been voted least likely to succeed. The ones who showed little or no promise.  

Perhaps you r...

The Unpredictable Gamble of Collecting Vintage Toys

If you are a child of the 80s, this week’s story of the latest vintage toy to sell for over half a million dollars (a Star Wars Boba Fett action figure) will probably cause you more than a few pangs of regret. What if you had kept those action figures in mint condition instead of tossing them off your roof trying to make them fly? Or, um, some other less specifically destructive memory.
Every time a toy like this sells, it makes me wonder the same question: what current toy might be worth buying ...

How Dr. Pepper Beat Pepsi to Become the Number Two Soda Brand

The Coke vs. Pepsi battle has been a branding rivalry that has defined soda sales for the past hundred years. What you might not know is that for most of that time, coming in at a close third place was Dr. Pepper … until now. This year for the first time, the brand inched out Pepsi to become the second most popular soda by sales in the US.
The victory is being credited to Dr. Pepper’s aggressive expansions into trying unusual flavors, their creative marketing programs and perhaps most importantly...

The Rise of Anti-Vegan Beauty

The idea of vegan beauty products is undeniably appealing for many people. Products that are sourced without animal byproducts are supposedly more natural, better for the environment and healthier for you. It’s one of the reasons why more than 86% of consumers say that they want more vegan beauty products. Yet in beauty, just like in food, vegan products may not be the healthy or environmentally friendly heroes they are promoted to be.

Marin Skincare is a startup in Maine that produces lo...