Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 59

5 Awesome (And Slightly Scary) Technology Stories You Should Know

Most weeks I tend to focus on stories about our culture, but this week my curation led more consistently toward technology with a wide range of articles about innovations, discoveries and new research. In the stories below you’ll find everything from human-animal embryo research to the cure for baldness. They may awaken your imagination or perhaps disturb you with their ambition, but they are all stories you should know about. If there is a theme among them, it is probably the reminder that...

6 Marketing Lessons From Ed Sheeran

There is a moment during a show at the Austin City Limits where Ed Sheeran finally starts to perform his biggest hit at the time: Shape of You. About 10 seconds into the performance, he breaks a guitar string. Watching what he does next is a master class in stage presence, preparation and perhaps the perfect example of why he is such an engaging stage performer:

For anyone who has watched one of my keynote presentations, you already know I’m a big fan of Ed Sheeran. Usually when I share a...

Is Social Media Making It Impossible To Grow Up?

It should be a basic human right to remember the past with fondness as being better than it actually was. Unfortunately, for today’s generation of young people, this may already be impossible.

“Can one ever transcend one’s youth if it remains perpetually present?” asks author Kate Eichhorn. As they grow up online, an underappreciated side effect is that their entire childhoods are recorded. It may indeed be the End of Forgetting, as the title of the book this article is excerpted from predic...

The Best Creative Ideas From Cannes

All week I have been reading stories of award winning creative advertising from Cannes (see all the winners here), and so I wanted to share several insights this week from a few of my favorite award winning campaigns this year.

Encouraging Black Travelers To #GoBackToAfrica
For years chants “go back to Africa” have been used by racists to marginalize people, but this campaign aims to turn the phrase around to make it an aspirational appeal for more African-Americans to come to visit Africa....

How Travel Inspires Better Thinking

It was a delight this week to see my friend Philippe Brown interviewed about the work he does to create luxury travel experiences for his clients. His insights on the importance of crafting the anticipation of travel, AI-enhanced experiences, using video game design to create a dramatic arc for travel and the role of behavioral psychology in crafting travel are all worth a read in the article linked above.

The role and impact of travel on how we think is a topic I have been considering quite...

Why Powerpoint Isn’t The Problem (And It Never Was)

Powerpoint doesn’t deserve your contempt.

The problem with Powerpoint is that many people abuse it or use it in lazy ways – and their presentations (and audiences) suffer. This week Microsoft announced they are adding a bunch of new features, including AI-enabled presentation coaching that will make suggestions to help you get rid of those “um’s,” fix your pacing, encourage you to rehearse and get rid of sensitive phrases or unclear language.

The tools will use artificial intelligence to he...

6 Stories To Make You Rethink What You Think

[image error] It’s not easy to rethink what you already know. Yet my curated stories this week reminded me of how important it is for all of us to question our current assumptions, as I did myself on everything from plastic bags always being bad (maybe they aren’t) to whether we should even have the expectation of privacy online (perhaps it doesn’t exist). I hope the stories this week cause you to raise similar questions for yourself.

Reevaluating Turbans
Last week a photo of San Diego-based bisexual neuro...

Prosperity Preachers, HBO’s “Feel Terrible” Hit And Why Your Vacation May Worsen Climate Change

Why HBO’s Chernobyl Is The Feel-Terrible Hit Everyone Needed
Like over six million viewers I have been completely engrossed in the storytelling of this startlingly accurate hit mini-series about the 80’s era nuclear disaster. The lessons for today are profound and despite casting that oddly seems to avoid any actual Russian actors in lead roles, the five episode series is worth binge-watching to offer a bit of “benign masochism” (enjoyment of moments when our bodies believe we’re in danger but...

The One Reason So Many Brand Pranks On April Fools Day Failed This Year

You might have seen that earlier this week I published a “Naan-Obvious” book with my wife to celebrate our love for delicious Indian bread. The timing of our launch (April Fools Day) was no coincidence. The book was a joke with purpose; a playful way to launch our new series called the Non-Obvious Guides which share advice that is “like having coffee with an expert.”

Read the full book below >>

TMy own guide to marketing is available now (see image below).

The Non-Obvious Guide To Small Bu...

How The Non-Obvious Trend Of “RetroTrust” Started Taking Off

One of the most popular trends from this year’s edition of Non-Obvious was a trend I called RetroTrust – the idea that we trust in brands and experiences from our past. Since I wrote the chapter, I am discovering new examples of the trend in real life all the time. Last week I told the story at the IHRSA Conferenceabout a video game I used to play when I was a kid made by the renowned Japanese video game maker Konami. The game was memorable because it had a secret code my brother and I would...