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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 #GoBackToAfricaFor years chants “go back to Africa” have been used by … Read more
If you think about it, there are a lot of brands that define what they do or how they sell based on their names. This week at CES, Mastercard announced they would be dropping the words of the name from their logo. It’s a smart move considering how the financial world is moving away from … Read more
Huawei’s New App Uses Sound To Let The Blind “See” Emotions Imagine an app that uses AI to read facial expressions and then translates the seven universal human emotions – anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise and contempt – into seven distinct sounds. Once it detects an emotion, it will play the sounds to allow visually … Read more
Japan Turns To Immigration To Solve National Demographic Crisis Can Japan find an antidote for their aging population crisis through immigration? The country is notorious for how difficult it is for outsiders to live and prosper, so it will be interesting to see if this new policy works. The First Major US Copyright Expiration In 20 Years … Read more
You know that moment in most long running TV shows when they do that recap show filled with all the greatest scenes from past episodes? Reading stories this week was a bit like watching one of those shows, with lots of recaps of the past year. So this week’s “holiday edition” of the Non-Obvious newsletter … Read more
New Study Finds That Kids Are More Flexible About Gender Identity One of the trends my team and I uncovered and wrote about this year in Non-Obvious was “Ungendered” – a term that describes how our shifting definitions of traditional gender roles are leading some to reject the notion of gender completely. A new study … Read more
I have often resisted describing myself as a futurist. To me, a futurist was someone who offered an ambitious prediction of the far future — usually focusing on things like energy produced by bio luminescent bacteria or 3D printed houses. Instead, I have spent close to the past decade predicting the near future. Every year, … Read more
When you ask Millennials to describe the doorbell, a surprising number use phrases like “panic-inducing,” “hateful” and “terrifying.” Sound overblown? It turns out many millennials see the doorbell as an unwanted intrusion much like a phone call during dinner from an 800 number. Friends or family don’t show up unannounced and ring the doorbell. They … Read more
This was an unexpected year for the Super Bowl … one where the game almost rivaled the ads for my interest. As you might expect – I spent the evening thinking not only about who had the cutest or more entertaining ad, but who had the best marketing strategy and perhaps more entertainingly, who had … Read more
Do you know a selfish brand? Most of us do. We encounter them constantly – trying to promote their latest and greatest product. Their ads seek to interrupt us and every interaction is clearly only focused on either closing a deal or collecting our information for their database. They think in terms of short term … Read more
Non-Obvious Thinking is my latest book about the 4 secrets of becoming a non-obvious thinker - relesaed 10/01/2024.
Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator, founder of the Non-Obvious Company and the 3-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author of ten books.
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In addition to Non-Obvious Thinking, Rohit is the author of 10 books on trends, the future of business, building a more human brand with storytelling and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world.
