Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 33

Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week:

Do you wish you had a better memory? Over the years I have probably read more than a dozen books that promise tips and tricks to improve your memory. Some are pretty formulaic, and others are slightly useful but hard to digest. The one I have come back to several times is Moonwalking with Einstein, first published in 2011. Inspired by writer Joshua Foer’s journey into the world of memory competitions, the book takes the secrets of “memory champions” and unvei...

Oslo’s Unexpected Tourism Campaign Tells Travelers Why They Shouldn’t Visit

Residents in every city love to complain about the daily minor or major frustrations they endure in order to live where they do, but what if the things they gripe about are the same reasons someone else might choose to visit? That’s the insight behind a clever campaign that has been going viral this week where an Oslo resident complains about not having to wait for a great table at a popular restaurant, or the lack of crowds or lines at various destinations. At the end, he wonders aloud whether ...

SpaghettiOs and the Curious Histories of Snack Foods

In 1967, food ads of the time began promoting “the greatest invention since the napkin.” Riding the wave of Italian-inspired convenience foods, that game-changing new product was a new spaghetti you could eat with a spoon which hit the markets with a perfectly descriptive brand name: SpaghettiOs. The canned product was a hit, quickly becoming a cultural icon and soon becoming a symbol of the growing American love affair with packaged foods. The true story of its creation, including the man who m...

Do We All Need a Media Blacklist?

Back in April, a reporter from the NY Times hiked 50 miles through the Amazon rainforest in order to visit and report on a story about the remote Marubo tribe getting access to the Internet for the first time. The original story published two weeks ago told the story of what happened next in multiple dimensions, from how education shifted to what different generations thought. One element of that story noted that some elders complained about how minors could now easily access pornography (a conc...

The Next Generation of Political Polling Is Asking AI to Simulate Human Voters

Have you ever picked up the phone to answer a call from a pollster? I can probably guess your answer, and that’s not uncommon. A tiny fraction of people actually answers those calls, which creates a predictably skewed result if political campaigns are truly relying on those calls to generate any useful insight. The modern solution to this that some researchers are advocating is to just have pollsters “call” artificial intelligence simulations of voters instead.

In early testing, these si...

Rare Trees – The Fascinating Stories of the World’s Most Threatened Species

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

From the cinnamon trees of the Philippines to the Patagonian cypress that lives for over 3000 years, this is the ultimate coffee table book about trees. More interestingly, though, it’s a fascinating way to read about the history of humanity through the trees that have sustained and carried us. Published in partnership with the Global Trees Campaign, the book features more than 300 color photos of the most spectacular and most threatened tree species in the wo...

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...