On Tuesday, I will be participating in a panel at Wesleyan entitled Can Social
Marketing Save the World?

In preparation, I wanted to pull up various videos that tie together some of my thoughts. The first is the trailer for The Ad and the Ego.

First, I think we need to re-evaluate our relationship to advertising, and particularly in terms of thinking about the subtext of advertisements. As I've written before, I believe that the subtext of most political advertisements, especially the ones that dominiated the recent elections is We Think You're Stupid. To me, one of the most important underlying messages of the Lamont campaign was one of participation.

In the first campaign ad we saw people rushing in, even before the advertisement was completed, and the introduction of the 'and so do we' theme.

There are two pieces online about how the media landscape is changing. The first is Epic and the second is Day of the Longtrail. They both talk about more citizen involvement with shaping our media. I really wanted to see and encourage citizen involvement in shaping the media for the campaign, because I believe that is a key part of how the change we are hoping for needs to come about.

Perhaps one of the best examples of what worked in the Lamont campaign was when CT Bob created this video. Later, the campaign created a similar ad.

Things that I would have liked to have seen, that didn't happen was people creating Machinima and doing other things to use games and other online tools to get the message out.

I believe that we can use social marketing to save the world. I believe that campaigns are a start to that, but that we need to go beyond campaigns, and that the key starting point is get more people involved in thinking critically about media and creating their own media.