Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 68

Why Facebook Rating Your Trustworthiness Is Good News

The Washington Post story this week revealing the “previously unreported ratings system” used by Facebook to rate the trustworthiness of users on a scale of zero to 1 has all the usual components of an outrage-worthy announcement. How dare Facebook think they can rate all of us? What if they abuse this system or someone hacks it? And doesn’t this just get us one step closer to the scary imagined world of Nosedive? Perhaps it’s a good time to take a step back and curb our outrage.

The problem...

Why More Millennials Are Uncovering Their Tattoos At Work

For the past several years the debate about tattoos at work has gone back and forth between those who think a tattoo is taboo in the office and those who feel it is a modern expression of individuality and may even help connect with certain people. The view of this article is that more millennials are uncovering their tattoos at work because they are less likely to be judged negatively for it today versus in the past.

New Study Finds Robots Can Emotionally Manipulate Humans Easily

A team of German researchers from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany studied how humans interact with robots. In a paper published in PLOS ONE – they offered the finding that people who were asked to turn a robot off were more likely to leave it on if the robot pleaded with them to “live.” The conclusion of the study was that the more human a machine acts, the more we can be emotionally manipulated into treating it as we might treat a fellow human. In the future this tendency for us...

Why Does The Internet Make Stupidity So Viral?

Earlier this week the US government had to officially ask people to stop jumping out of moving cars to dance in the streets in response to a viral dance challenge for one of Drake’s songs. About the same time I first read this story, for some reason another story and video about how you can make a spare tire by wrapping duct tape around a bare rim popped up. It’s hard to get away from stories like these and they all seem to have one thing in common: they take stupidity and glorify it to the p...

Why Netflix Uses Taste Communities Instead of Demographics

Last week Netflix announced that they would be stopping their long standing policy of asking customers to vote on early pilots for programs to see if they have enough critical mass and audience to continue. In the same week, at a television industry event a Netflix executive shared that Netflix finds demographics to be useless as a predictor of what people watch. Instead, “Netflix’s scientists have found that there are several connections among content types and what people like to watch, whi...

Victorinox and How To Use Powerfully Ordinary Videos For Marketing

One piece of advice I am fond of sharing from the stage is about the importance of showing your work – something we are told to do in school but often forget. This brand video from Victorinox is a twelve minute journey behind the scenes into how their iconic Swiss Army Knives are made. The video, now a few years old, is boring, matter of fact and is too long … but it is also a great reminder that sometimes just showing what you do behind the scenes is interesting enough to be a way to engage...

The Big Question Facing The Future Of Media and Publishing Online

Recently a contributor to Forbes named Panos Mourdoukoutas wrote an opinion piece suggesting that local taxpayers would be better off if libraries were replaced with Amazon. The article created an instant controversy and media reporting of the outrage led Forbes to quickly take it down. For years the expansion of contributors to the Forbes network has led to plenty of so-called experts with questionable credentials writing self promotional articles. Earlier this year, there was a long post ab...

What British Grocery Chains Can Teach Us About Delivering Retail With Empathy

British supermarkets are quickly becoming the unexpected pioneers in adding more empathy into retail. In January, Tesco introduced a “slow checkout line” for customers who have dementia or otherwise need more time to check out. This week, Morrisons, another British supermarket chain, announced it would have “quiet hours” to help autistic shoppers to have a more noise-free shopping trip. Both are beautiful non-obvious examples of how a small change can create a retail experience more welcoming...

Binge Rooms: The Ultimate Immersive TV Experience

Back when I worked at a marketing agency I remember those times when I would see a campaign so inspired it would immediately make me wish I had thought of it. This new effort from FCB New York is one of those envy-inducing efforts. The goal is to position LG TVs as the ones that your binge-watching experience of your favorite shows deserves and the clever idea is to let you watch those shows in a set that recreates the environment of the show. So you can watch The Crown inside of an actual Br...

Why The Joy Of Missing Out (JOMO) Is So Hot Right Now

Facebook recently added a feature to help you track how much time you spend on the platform. Instagram will now show a checkmark when you are done scrolling through your friends’ updates from the past two days. A recent NY Times feature even proposed that this might be the summer of “JOMO” (the joy of missing out), a “benevolent younger cousin” to FOMO (the fear of missing out). This shift has been in the making for years. Spending all day reading posts about people having fun without you is...