Los Angeles always gets a bad rap when it comes to preserving historic architecture. It’s very true when you look at Hollywood. Most of the architectural landmarks are gone. If you grew up in the 40’s you wouldn’t recognize today’s Hollywood. The opposite is true of the core of downtown LA. The same buildings you see in this clip, are still around and they’re revitalizing the whole core as we speak. At last.

4 years ago I weighed 210 pounds. I was running a few miles per week, eating decently healthy – age just caught up to me. So was my inner narrative. My Cholesterol levels were off the chart; I was on the brink of tapping into the world of statins. Everybody around me did it, why shouldn’t I?

Within a few months, both of my parents died. For some reason, I decided to live a healthier lifestyle. I went from size 34 to 30, lost 50 pounds and my Cholesterol level went down by 80%.

Don’t sell a need, sell a demand.

People know they need to lose weight, but they demand chips and salsa.

People know they need to change the world but they demand to watch Dancing with the Stars.

Filling people’s needs will get you nowhere.

Why?

Because you decide what they need. Not them.

If you want people to stop smoking, you need to sell them something they demand, like being unique or being healthy to meet the grandchildren. Not lecture them about what they need.

When I needed to lose weight, I didn’t look for brands to tell me what to do. I looked for brands that helped me in my quest. Fulfilled my demand.

Big difference.

P.S.: 4 years later, I’m still at 170 pounds. Because I demanded it.

Some agencies are still struggling to integrate digital into their offerings, developing holistic communication and prospering in the digital culture. It’s getting late in the game because integration was just a small mountain to conquer, compared to the Mt. Everest all of us are about to face:

Keeping up with the increasing speed of technology change

Our greatest challenge is simply keeping up-to-date with the technology from both the perspective of communication product delivery and media. Agencies were struggling to implement new experiences when Timeline was introduced and the new retina display for the iPad caused chaos for publishers and advertisers.

We have to acknowledge making the transition into the new world is not enough, we have to have our finger on the pulse of this dramatically changing world, filled with streams and feeds, and be able to respond to the changing requirements that technology is forcing upon you. No one wants to be left behind, drowning in the streams and no one wants to appear dated and behind the times with when they communicate digitally.

The emerging fragmentation of social media channels has just begun and adds a level of complexity to the task at hand. This doesn’t mean we should jump on the next Path bandwagon once it rolls through ad land. Successful agencies of the future will have to keep up with the technological change and being able to anticipate it, build for it, and stay ahead of it. Agencies need to constantly read and live the pulse of change, build small experiences on new platforms to experiment. test, and, possibly, scale up and down. And you thought integration was a challenge. You ain’t see nothing yet.

Millions of people before us have worked to explore the world, learn and educate us. Scientists  worked long hours to find an answer. Physicists tried to help us to understand the world around us better. Economists have done their best to gain significant understanding about the long-term impact of our short-term decisions. Historians want us to learn from the past. Marketers failed, succeeded just to fail miserably again.

Who are we, then, to dismiss them? To make up facts? To create realities? To make others belive that science is matter of opinion, something we can skip for leisure? How can you work in the marketing world when you don’t know about David Ogilvy, Clay Shirky, Jaron Lanier, Doc Searls or Lester Wunderman?

You need to know the rules before you break the rules.

You need to know everything in your field of expertise before you start to criticize and tear down their ideas. While it seems sometimes impossible to keep up with the information streams, we owe it to ourselves, our clients and our team to learn and know everything you can. Only then are you capable of breaking the rules and creating your own destiny.