On Tuesday, hundreds of students packed into SCI150 to attend a panel on the effectiveness of social marketing, an ideology that has defined Wesleyan since the war in Vietnam. Social marketing is the idea that society can be changed for the better via publicity and awareness campaigns.

Advertised with slogans such as, “Do Save Darfur shirts really do anything,” the panel, entitled “Social Marketing: Can Consumer Marketing Work on Social Issues?” had representation from four different sectors—academic social marketers, peace in Darfur activists, environmental activists, and liberal internet activists—who all happened to agree that social marketing works.

“I think a ton of people showed up because the flyers were very provocative,” said Arielle Golden ’10. “Everyone wants to know if their activism is really worthwhile.”

She questioned the balance of the panel, however.

“The problem was that it was really more of a tutorial, an Activism 101 sort of thing, than any real debate on the effectiveness of social marketing,” Golden said. “The actual critical question of whether it works or not was brushed aside within the first five minutes—there was no debate at all.”

Leslie Snyder, Professor of Communications Science at the University of Connecticut, opened the night by quickly analyzing the ethical pros and cons of social marketing as a means of social change and proving that yes, it does work.

“While the anti-drug campaign, the costliest social marketing campaign ever at 1 billion dollars, did not work,” she said, “the anti-cigarette ‘Truth’ campaign did work…also, immunizations rose from 30 percent in 1981 to 80 percent in 1996. Typically a media campaign can change behavior by five percentage points.”

Ronan Farrow, a Yale Law student with an admirable resume, impressed many with his impassioned description of the situation as he sees it in Darfur. Farrow, a representative of the Genocide Intervention Network who returned from Darfur in June, has met with Nigerian Leaders to talk about AIDS prevention and has also appeared on MSNBC, ABC, CNN and in the Wall Street Journal. He encouraged the audience to overwhelm the press and political leaders with calls to take up action.

“As I speak to you, the most brutal and deadly phase of this genocide is in progress,” he said. “Everyone should put an op-ed in their local paper because the media has dropped the ball on Darfur.”

Russia and China have been complicit in the genocide, he said.

“Sudan is seeking to purchase another billion dollars of weaponry from Russia, and Beijing’s investments in Sudan lie around four billion dollars,” he said.

Farrow used a good portion of his time to talk about the situation in Darfur, also showing evocative photographs that he took of badly mutilated victims. However, he did make time to say a little about how to help.

“Get a bunch of students together and do something fun,” he said. “I’ve heard that some students in Florida did a Dance Dance Revolution tournament for Darfur. The real question is how can we grow the successful movement here to other countries.”

“For the most part Farrow wasn’t talking about social marketing,” said Noa Wotton ’10. “He was demonstrating it.”

Next was Aldon Hynes, whose button down shirt with the word “BLOGGER” emblazoned on the breast pocket said it all. A former Wall Street technology executive, Hynes is now in the game of following and contributing to blogs such as Daily Kos and MyDD as well as employing his internet expertise for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, John Destefano’s run for governor of Connecticut, and Ned Lamont’s run for a seat in the Senate. He also manages to run his own website, Orient Lodge, which he calls a “literary outpost on the internet.”

In particular, Hynes showcased Lamont’s campaign as an example of the power of using the internet to organize a support base behind a politician. In one case, a blogger that supported Lamont, CTBob, had, as a joke, created a parody of the classic film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” in a black-and-white short entitled “Mr. Lamont Goes to Washington.” Soon after CTBob posted the small YouTube video on a blog, the Lamont campaign used the exact idea for a real television ad.

Ultimately, Hynes trumpeted the news of this new political force in the media, the Netroots, which he sees, like many other pundits, as ushering in a new era of populist citizen journalism.

“We need to take back the media,” he said. “It’s run by six different media conglomerates and we now have the ability to change that landscape.”

Jesse Littlewood, the recruitment director of Green Corps, a year long environmental action training program, spoke about how his organization implements marketing solutions to fight corporate abuse. According to Littlewood, corporations such as Coca Cola, Pepsi and Nestle have created huge bottled water industries in order to horde as much water as they can before an impending world-wide water shortage.

“They are literally looking to drain the Great Lakes,” he said.

Environmental activists first must demand that those three major corporations stop misleading the public and secondly, they must incite anger around the gross ripoffs perpetrated by those companies, Littlewood said.

“We organized a tap water challenge, modeled after the Pepsi challenge, to get the media to cover the issue,” he said. “The vast majority of people can’t tell the difference between bottled water and tap water.”

The tap water challenge was eventually featured on the Today Show. In the past, Littlewood has also succeeded in forcing Caribbean cruise lines to install pollution control systems.

Students reacted to the panel differently. Josh Steingraber ’10 was particularly skeptical.

“They were talking about things to get other people to do what they want them to do,” he said. “[Activist social marketing] doesn’t do shit.”

Dominic Ireland ’09 noted disagreements between the panelists on the effectiveness of the internet.

“It was interesting how they contradicted each other on how social marketing worked,” he said.

“Jesse Littlewood was the most effective,” said Golden. “He first talked about theory and then he talked about his successful application of it.”

Koblenz disagreed.

“I thought Littlewood’s arguments were one sided,” he said. “In terms of the Great Lakes example, all water—including tap water—is drained from some natural source.”

If nothing else, the large turnout indicated that issues such as these still hold weight on campus.