This year we have the special honour of being part of this global event occurring in Toronto. The World Social Marketing Conference (WSMC)  brings together the world’s leading thinkers and practitioners in the areas of social marketing, behavior change and behavior economics from Sunday 21 April to Tuesday 23 April. On Wednesday, 24 April, a select few of these experts have been asked to share their ideas with you at Leading Social Change.

Click to register now and get the earlybird rate!

Toronto Board of Trade
First Canadian Place
4th Floor, Ballroom
77 Adelaide Street West

Be sure to check out all the other great events happening during Advertising Week!

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A wide variety of speakers, each outlining an unique approach to effecting social change using marketing, and offering some incredible insight into social marketing were on hand. As well, we were offered three case-studies of effective social marketing campaigns at the , and the chance to listen to an international ABC News correspondent give us a firsthand account of the more incredible and world-changing events of our time – the Arab Spring, and specifically the Libyan Uprising, during Jeffrey Kofmann’s keynote address “Witness to Change.”

Clive Blair-Stevens, the Director of Strategic Social Marketing, shook the early-morning cobwebs out of our heads with his first talk, speaking on Social Marketing and Public Health in the UK. A 12 year veteran of working on the government side with policy, he offered a wide variety of insights from experience, tying them into a wider perspective of behavioural science. Blair-Stevens spoke specifically of “Mindset changes” – strategic ways of approaching a social problem and changing behaviour that can produce results at a significantly reduced cost. Blair-Stevens said that it’s obvious from years of failed programs and campaigns that the traditional communications/rational actor approach has failed, and in an era of lowering budgets and escalating social problems, it’s time to take a new tack. The solution is to intelligently apply lessons learned from the behavioural sciences and other jurisdictions to achieve positive social results.

As the conference’s first speaker, Blair-Stevens did a great job in both laying out the challenges that social marketers have faced, and how the new paradigm of a citizen-focused, customer-centric approach to behavioural challenges can produce more effective, cheaper results. One of the interesting examples Blair-Stevens brought up was that of the UK government’s experience with ensuring all students ate a balanced and healthy breakfast. When students have a healthy breakfast, they’re less likely to be disruptive in class, concentrate easily, and are (in general) simply better students. The government found that simply offering healthy breakfasts did not do much to encourage actual participation. Students were being required to come early to school (not an easy sell ever, really).

A different kind of breakfast club

A breakthrough came when instead of marketing it as a healthy breakfast program, the government billed it as an MTV Music Club – an opportunity to meet with friends and socialize before school, that had the seemingly incidental benefit of offering a healthy breakfast. Participation in the program greatly increased, and the associated behavioural problems associated with an undernourished student populace (lack of concentration, acting out, and so forth) were greatly reduced. For more information on Clive Blair-Stevens, his background, and a copy of his presentation, please visit his speaker’s page.

Population Services International‘s Marketing and Communications director for the Caribbean Kerry Singh was the next speaker, offering a perspective on the unique challenges of promoting condom use in the Caribbean to fight growing HIV/AIDS prevalence rates that are the second highest in the world. PSI faced a lot of ingrown resistance to their program – resistance from religious groups, the socio-cultural biases against condoms, transaction sexual relationships, and funding were just a few, but with ingenuity and a fundamental understanding of the psychology and behaviours of the audience, was able to create a wide-ranging campaign that met many of those challenges, and with a sense of humour.

One of the more intriguing campaign challenges that Singh and PSI faced was how to normalize lubricant. Lubricant was seen as a product exclusively used by homosexuals, and as the Caribbean tends to be a very homophobic region, there was a mountain of suspicion to climb. A cheeky and fun TV spot that positioned lubricant not as a “safe choice” or “the right thing to do,” but rather as the necessary ingredient for a “quickie” sexual encounter was able to change prevailing attitudes towards lubricant.

But PSI also worked to creating visibility outside of the traditional areas of print, radio and television ads – ensuring that condoms were available at barber shops (social meeting places exclusively the domain of men – and therefore hubs of “blue” conversation), producing “Ride Safe” branded bumper stickers, informative tents at cultural events, and countless other low-cost initiatives that helped normalize condom use.

The wide variety and breadth of micro-campaigns related to this emergent health crisis was truly astonishing, and too extensive to go into detail here, so I definitely encourage anyone interested to read please visit Kerry Singh’s speaker’s page or the Got It? Get It campaign page.

Immediately following Singh’s presentation was an eye-opening talk on Behavioral Science and Energy Conservation, another truly pressing issue, from Dr. Hunt Allcott, of NYU and the National Bureau of Economic Research. I’ll go into his talk, as well as that of other speakers like New York Times best-selling author Steve Martin in the next part of the event wrap-up.

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]]> http://leadingsocialchange.ca/lsc-2012-a-sold-out-success/feed/ 0 http://leadingsocialchange.ca/welcome-to-leading-social-change-and-national-advertising-week/ http://leadingsocialchange.ca/welcome-to-leading-social-change-and-national-advertising-week/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:00:59 +0000 jaywatts http://leadingsocialchange.ca/?p=675 Continue reading →]]> Marketing originating with not-for-profit organizations or the public sector is often the source of social change. Leading Social Change shines a light on innovative social marketing that is currently being created in Canada and the world. This year Leading Social Change features speakers from Canada, the U.K. and the Caribbean who will challenge you with new ideas, innovative tools and powerful inspiration. This event is designed to accelerate the professional development of social marketing communicators, senior public sector policy makers and communications planners in the public and private sector.

We hope you will enjoy the day and take away an idea or two that will inspire you and your team and hopefully, make your work more exciting and more effective.

Please note that shortly after the conference, presentations will be posted on this website.

Sincerely,

The Organizing Committee
Leading Social Change 2012

Rick Belanger
Melissa Blair
Loretto Breen
Dennis Edell, Co-Chair
Laura La Marca-Friday
Dayl Field
Anne O’Hagan
Ali Rahman
Wendy Seed
Laurie Sloan
Yvette Thornley, Co-Chair

A very special thanks to ARB Chair, Michel Frappier without whose help this conference could not be.

Thanks to our many volunteers who gave of their time today to make this conference possible.

The Age of Persuasion

Let’s start at the beginning again, shall we? Before social marketing was defined as a discipline in 1971, social marketing tactics had already been implemented in India to promote birth control because “a persuasion-based approach was favored over a legislative approach”, says Les Pappas, founder of Better World Advertising. Pappas asserted that while several legislative and policy initiatives can be adopted to impact behavior, the fundamental role of social marketing is to “encourage people to make changes on their own”. He says social marketing is “not about forcing people to make changes, it’s more focused on showing people that certain behaviors are more in their own self-interest or for the greater good than others, and helping them make [those] changes”. Of course, such an approach works best in tandem with effective policy changes. Pappas cited tobacco as an example, where taxation made smoking less financially attractive and legislative changes banned smoking in public places, all of which functioned in conjunct with decades-long social marketing efforts to help individuals reconsider the habit. He points to the fact that by 2009, smoking had fallen to 13%, a 42% decrease since 1988 as a measure of success.

But such alignment isn’t always the case. Pappas’ talk offered a sobering view of the challenges facing social marketers in the United States, where policy is often driven from the top-down and shifts with the will of the executive branch.

Pappas’ talk stood out among presenters, as he was the only speaker to really focus on the obstacles often encountered by social marketers, be they lack of funding, lack of political will or outright censorship.

I called Les Pappas in his New York office (he has agencies on both coasts) to talk about being a social marketer in the United States of America.

What are some of the differences between working with non-profits, NGOs and Governments?

I think the differences are pretty dramatic. Most of the NGOs we work with are on the small side and I think a lot of it has to do with size. If you’re working with an organization that has 10-100 people that’s very different than working for a huge state or federal agency that has thousands of employees.

We also work with small, local government agencies (city and county health departments). Small organizations mean less bureaucracy, fewer rules and they tend to be less political. They also allow easier access to the people you’re working with and fewer levels of hierarchy. Typically, people that you’re dealing with in smaller organizations are the decision makers

In large government organizations, oftentimes the people that we’re working with don’t have the authority to make decisions. It goes up and up and up and up. Sometimes it goes up to people who are really rather detached from the whole process.

How do the politics effect your business? Are you ever asked to outright stop a campaign?

Sure. It really does depend on the political winds that are blowing. We work with a number of large state health departments in particular, and one state in particular had a very conservative governor, and we were working on AIDS prevention. This administration didn’t want to deal with HIV or AIDS. They didn’t see it as priority, I think they probably saw it as a distraction. And then that administration changed, and we were at it again.

Don’t public health issues like HIV trump political whims?

Well, HIV is rife with moral interpretations and debates. We had a campaign that was running in Albany NY and it was aimed at African American gay men. Because it dealt with sex and homosexuality people started complaining. They didn’t want their kids exposed to lifestyles and sexual activities they see as wrong. They’re anti-gay, they’re homophobic and they want to control how their families are exposed to those issues.

Did you get pushback from the black community as well?

Yes, sure.

Doesn’t that prove a point?

Yes absolutely. I think I talked about the culture war. The USA is a very divided country. A lot of it is along these moral issues. A lot of it is based in people’s religious beliefs. And they don’t want their tax dollars going to something they don’t approve of.

It’s not unlike the abortion issue, where you have these pitched battles where both sides are saying we don’t approve of this and we don’t want our government putting resources into it. It’s the same thing with HIV. A lot of people feel like “people know how to avoid HIV, if they don’t assess the risks, they should know better, it’s their problem. Then there’s this whole question of sexual orientation in the society. We’re fighting about whether gays can serve in the military, we’re fighting about gay marriage, we’re fighting about all sorts of things. And some people are simply opposed to any recognition from the government of those kinds of lifestyles.

With I Am Gay, I Am The Cure and We’re Still Here campaigns, were you concerned that you were making a strong link between homosexuality and HIV? Doesn’t that reinforce the stigma?

Well, we debate that in certain circles… The forum that I was at last night was about social marketing and the NYC deptartment of public health put out an ad campaign in December that was specifically targeted to gay men and it was an HIV prevention ad. And a lot of people within the gay community felt like they were showing gay men in a negative light. So we have those tensions within the community.

I suppose the question is, what is the place of HIV in the gay community? I think it’s undeniably a major issue in a way that it isn’t for the rest of the population, you know if you look at the prevalence.

You know, we did a campaign a while ago in Los Angeles called HIV Is A Gay Disease. And people went ballistic. It got a national response. Coverage all around the country. People within the gay community said we’ve been fighting for years trying to get people to understand that HIV is NOT a gay disease and it affects everyone.

And that was sort of the problem. We had convinced ourselves that it wasn’t a gay disease. We convinced ourselves that it was somebody else’s disease. That it was drug users that it was people in Africa.

The tag line was Own it, End it. I think that it’s not only a gay disease, but it clearly is our disease, that we as gay men have to take on and own and deal with. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think if we don’t do that, then we’re not going to
address it successfully.

How do you measure success on a campaign like that?

I wouldn’t underestimate the value of this qualitative process/outcomes that we can measure. If you’re getting a lot of press coverage, web traffic, YouTube views, that is a good measure of some things, it is a measure of the reach of the campaign and the level of engagement. You know when we talk social media that’s all people talk
about: engagement.

On the other end there is actual outcome evaluation, which is really important. Is the campaign really working beyond the fact that you’ve gotten all this attention. The trick is to leverage a campaign so you do get that earned media and you do get that buzz but not just for the sake of it, it has to lead to something in terms of behaviour change, so that has to be measured in whatever ways it can be measured. We survey people after a campaign is done (and obviously it’s self reported) but we ask them did you see it? What did you think about it? How did it impact how you think?

That kind of evaluation is important to see if it really did work.

Do you think there is sometimes too much emphasis on post-campaign measurement?

That also gets very political. I think that when government gets involved they put a lot of expectations and demands on these campaigns including evaluation, and I think there is kind of a losing sight of the real world. We know when we talk to people what they say, and we can observe a lot, and that gets discounted, because  people in government, they need data, they need the numbers to stand behind to defend their programs and choices, and I think there can be an over-reliance on that. Where sometimes it becomes almost more important than the project itself.

My background in social marketing is the HIV epidemic in the mid-eighties. Social marketing was in its infancy. We didn’t have a lot of information. but we were responding to a crisis and we relied on a lot of intuition, creativity, and the word on the street, a lot of stuff that is hard to quantify.

Social marketing is part science and part art. When we abandon our intuition and humanistic qualities, it becomes something else.

Earlier you spoke about how the USA is a deeply divided country these days. Just curious, is there a right-wing equivalent for social marketing? All of the campaigns I can think of lean liberal.

I think there is an equivalent, I was in Atlanta (and Austin Texas) last month, and in both trips, driving from airport to hotel, I saw a lot of billboards that were espousing these conservative positions. You know, pro-life/anti-abortion stuff. I mean, I guess that’s social marketing. They’re going billboards, they’re on the street heanding out leaflets, they’re building websites.

I’d say the same thing around guns. Obviously there’s the NRA and they have their lobbying arm, but you know, they do campaigns.

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