Dear Fellow Trend Curator,

Happy New Year! I hope you had (or are having!) a restful and energizing start of the new year. For me, this year is going to be one of connection where I aim to find new ways to bring people together at the events I’m part of and also do my best to show up for the people in my life.

This week has also been about preparing for CES in Vegas where I’ll be next week covering non-obvious innovations and interviewing the entrepreneurs behind them. If you’ll be in town, please drop me a line and let me know so I can invite you to one of the gatherings I’m hosting!

Also, please follow me on Instagram too at @rohitbb to see my latest videos from the trade show floor throughout the week next week - including at least one interview with a surprise celebrity guest!

Until then, enjoy this week’s stories and stay curious,

Rohit

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The Long Game of the Kardashians May Be Smarter Than You Think

Most of us know that reality TV is often heavily scripted and edited to tell an intentionally melodramatic story. Usually the on-screen participants have little to no control over how they are portrayed. The Kardashians have always been different. The family has frequently been criticized for having little talent and only being famous for being famous--the ultimate oxymoron. Yet over the past decade, the individual sisters from this "untalented" family have taken their fame and turned it into multiple lucrative billion dollar companies.

An article from this month's Rolling Stone offered a more non-obvious assessment of how the Kardashians are currently (and perhaps have always) leveraged their fame to play a long game few have appreciated:

"The ability to pivot the brand into different spaces and eras is the main reason why we shouldn’t count the Kardashians out just yet. Their genius — and Kim’s in particular — is that they understand the importance of change ... they have an awareness of where they need to pivot next and when. They are in the process of trying to transfer their reality star fame into other genres. They are less interesting but by a very purposeful design."

Now as Season Six of the Kardashians gets set to air next month - the "reality" presented in the show is likely to be shamelessly filled with plugs for products and operate very much like an infomercial to sell merch. In other words, they have built the fame doing what they needed to do ... and now they're cashing in. You may not be a fan of their journey, but it's hard to dismiss these sisters as lacking talent.

What We Can Learn From 2024 Most Hated Ads

The worst ads of the year, according to marketing publication The Drum, included Apple's cringy ad showing the iPad literally crushing human creativity, Google showing how AI could help a seven year cheat her way through writing a fan letter to an Olympian, Jaguar's controversial brand revamp, Bumble's bumbling ad imploring their female users to hook up more often and several others. I had to agree with the assessments for the various ads/campaigns being terrible, but looking at the list there were two things that stood out for me.

The first was that brands who got the cultural zeitgeist wrong suffered the most. In a time when people were worried about the potentially huge changes that AI will bring to our professional lives and the lives of children growing up with it, making light of that or dismissing the worries about tech killing or replacing human creativity was a losing message. Both Apple and Google paid for it.

Secondly, for both Bumble and Jaguar the backlash was a result of brands with a reputation seemingly being willing to throw that goodwill away in service of pivoting in a new unpopular direction. Jaguar potentially alienated their longtime brand fans. And Bumble, long celebrated as the leading dating platform to empower women first, apparently abandoned this focus with their campaign.

The conclusion anyone in marketing can draw from the examples is about the importance of understanding both what your brand stands for and the culture within which you are marketing it. Get those two things wrong, and you will predictably fail.

How 2025 Could Become The Year of Reuse

Every time I would visit India growing up, one sight would fascinate me as we traveled the roads was the number of old Ambassador black taxis that continued to dominate the roads for five decades. The thing I didn't know as a child but later learned, was that the "secret" to their longevity was that the insides of the cars would be completely replaced over time. While the iconic car brand has since been discontinued, I couldn't help thinking about it this week as a read about a luxury service designed to do something similar for Porsche 911 cars.

By itself, this is an intriguing service - but it's also an example of a broader trend that will be one to watch in 2025: reuse and upcycling. There are examples of this happening in many industries across the world.

Leading architecture firm Gensler predicts a boom in "adaptive reuse" becoming one of the hottest trends in building this year leading to "creative conversions of aging buildings as economic and environmental imperatives ... office to office, office to clinic, retail to sports and entertainment, retail to health and wellness."

More than a dozen leading brands across fashion, furniture and shoes have launched their own branded buyback programs encouraging their customers to resell products back to them for resale in exchange for credit to use later. Some industry watchers in fashion are expecting that upcycling clothes in this way could be the sustainable fashion trend of 2025.

Even technology products, perhaps the most notorious category for generating frequent waste thanks to how quickly products become dated, is now increasingly sharing ideas for upcycling technology products by reusing them and even FINALLY allowing people to open and fix their own malfunctioning devices thanks to the recent "right to repair" legislation that was implemented in 2023.

All this is a hopeful message to start the new year. If 2025 does indeed become the year where reuse takes off, we will all benefit by both saving money and positively impacting the environment by reducing waste as well.

Will Facebook Become A Sad AI-Dominated Graveyard In the Coming Year?

Facebook announced they are going to get more aggressive with allowing AI-generated users and profiles on Facebook. In a move literally no one was asking for, they announced the shift and one of their senior AI execs at Facebook described their vision this way:

"We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do. They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform... that's where we see all of this going."

People were justifiably "disgusted" as several media reports noted, and also worried that a platform which is already frequently used by both the elderly and conspiracy theorists, among many others, will now make it even harder for the most vulnerable people to separate fabrication from reality. On a business level, marketers are worried that now AI-generated "impressions" which are obviously worthless will now be counted when measuring impact of messages and generating invoices for advertising - leading to inflated numbers and fraudulent billing.

You would expect there will be some measures in place to prevent this, but the broader dangers of unleashing so many fake accounts and training them to presumably get closer and closer to mimicking the behaviors and quirks of real people is almost certainly a terrible idea on many levels. Which unfortunately offers no insulation against them going ahead and doing it anyway.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Infectious Generosity

Chris Anderson knows big ideas. As the head of Ted, the global organization behind Ted talks and Ted X events, he has been witness to the backstory of more big ideas than most. His biggest is that humans are hardwired to be generous. Not that it’s easy to remember that in a world that seems colder than it actually is. Yet the stories he tells and examples he brings together offer a reminder that we all can give ourselves the grace to be our most generous selves and make a difference in the world around us along the way. It's a perfect message to share at the start of the year.

From explaining the power of courageous generosity to outlining exactly how mainstream media could shift our global experience of generosity, to how big tech could implement changes to algorithmically, elevate generous stories, this book is the ultimate guide on how to bring more generosity to our worlds by practicing more of it ourselves and making it part of our core identity to do it.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• Inside the Factory of 400 Year Old Cymbal Maker Zildjian 

• Cancel Culture On Campus: Most of Us Are Terrified ...

• 'Firkle', 'Gluschdich' and more: 10 words We Learned in 2024 That Will Expand Your Mind 

• How Airlines Pick the Movies on Your Flights 

• The Greatest Keyboard Never Sold

How are these stories curated?