Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 13

No one wants one. People will walk past a penny lying on the street, a real-life demonstration of just how worthless it is for most of us. For many, it’s also a perfect example of governmental inefficiency since it’s widely known that the cost to produce each one is higher than the actual value of the penny itself. It is estimated that the U.S. government loses 2.7 cents on every penny it mints. If they stopped making them, it would save about $85 million a year. Sounds great.

Unfortunately, ...

A big presence on social media may have seemed like a nice-to-have for creators but in the case of Hollywood films, there’s growing evidence that it may already be a necessity. In a recent interview with Variety, actor Ethan Hawke shared some observations about the growing role a social media platform is taking in casting decisions for projects and even if those projects get the green light from studios and funders in the first place:

“Sometimes I’ll be setting a movie up and someone will say...

Michael Jackson recorded 12 songs with his longtime producer Bryan Loren that were never released to the public. According to multiple sources, the songs have been collecting dust in the archives of the estate run by MJ’s family. Recently cassette recordings of these songs were found in the bottom of a box somewhere and now an auction house wants to sell the recordings to the highest bidder. The estate wants to block the sale, noting that the original copyright belongs to them so even if someone...

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...

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.”

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...