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This podcast is presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC – safer, healthier people.

My name is Marv Goldberg and I’m going to be the timekeeper. I just heard Ed Maibach say that this session follows rather well from the plenary speaker’s talk. If you go back to the 1950s when TV was first becoming a force, social scientists were really worried that we had the power over people so that they would respond robotically. We’ve learned a lot since. Maybe they don’t respond at all. And what we’ve learned of course is that people don’t sit in vacuums and respond robotically, they are actually part of social networks, the people around them influence them, they influence those around them, and organizations around them influence the target audience. And so the focus today and the title of the session I remind you is “Disseminating Public Health Programs, Lessons for Health Marketing.” That dissemination, if it was in the 1950s or probably 1980s, would say how do we reach people by hitting them directly? Well we’ve learned a good deal since. A, we can’t in a sense because they’re going to touch base with all those others and we better touch base with all those others and we don’t need to because we can build alliances, work within the channel and that’s what the folks here today have been focused on in their work and will be talking about.

So the order of things are, in fact, just a little different from what you see in the program. Jim Dearing of the Kaiser Permanente and Ed Maibach, George Washington University and more laterally at George Mason, will begin and you’ll see the very nice parallels between the model that they build of looking at how to build alliances and I guess the substantive issue in their cases physical activity build alliances with organizations, institutions to reach that ultimate target audience.

Bill Smith who is the Executive Vice President of AED will focus on sales persons in the channel and then lastly, Ralph Oliva, my colleague at Penn State who is Executive Director of the ISBM, The Institute for the Study of Business Markets and a professor at Penn State, is somebody who spends his days working with and studying business-to-business - the influence of businesses on other businesses in the channel - how to reach other businesses, get them to cooperate with you by [inaudible], etc. So having you use that model to look at the problems that we face in health marketing.

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