Emergency Episode!

World Social Marketing Conference: Hot Takes & Game-Changing Ideas

Host: Ruth Dale 
Guests: Ed Gyde, Katherine Knight, Ian Fannon

We rushed home from sunny Spain with too much excitement not to podcast about it. This episode unpacks the World Social Marketing Conference, its biggest sparks, freshest ideas, and the vibe shift happening across global behaviour change.

 

🔥 Theme of the Conference

Social marketing isn’t social media. It’s a discipline that improves lives - at scale.

The event was bursting with:

• Planet-saving ideas 🌍

• New ways to boost agency + confidence 💪

• Serious ✨community power✨

• Big questions about equity + systems change 🏛️

 

💡 Guest Highlights & Key Takeaways

🟦 Ed Joy – Audience, Social Marketing (UK)

KEY TAKEAWAY: Stop peppering teens with single-issue campaigns. Build spaces and confidence instead.

Ed shared the Sky Girls campaign — an empowering pan-African platform helping girls say no to pressure and yes to themselves.

His energy:
👟 Less “don’t smoke”
🎮 More DJ booths, gaming, and real talk
💬 Real empowerment > behaviour nagging

Ed’s Big Thought:

“Create places and platforms where young people want to be - then the learning sticks.”

 

🟩 Katherine Knight – Intelligent Health

KEY TAKEAWAY: Boosting > Nudging. Joy is a public health tool.

Her Beat the Streets programme has already inspired 2 million people to get active, connect, and build community agency.

🔥 Massive shift at the conference:
Climate change + inequality + health?
➡️ One and the same mission.

Catherine’s favourite learning:

Boosting builds people's capacity to choose change — together, not alone.

Bonus: we want a whole episode on Catherine’s disaster-prep flannel story. 🚿🧽 Pure gold.

 

🟥 Ian Fannon – Claremont Communications

KEY TAKEAWAY: Behaviour change takes time. Build, boost, bond and evaluate rigorously.

Ian’s 3 B’s of brilliant behaviour change:
1️⃣ Building — long-term investment beats short campaigns
2️⃣ Boosting — focus on strengths + capabilities
3️⃣ Bonding — community + connection = magic ✨

His favourite takeaway:

“We strengthen the good already in communities - we don’t fix broken humans.”

 

 

🧠 Big Ideas We’re Taking Forward

✔ Elevate agency over persuasion
✔ Build movements, not one-off messages
✔ Climate + health + equity are intertwined
✔ We need practitioners and academics working side-by-side
✔ Behaviour change isn’t instant -invest in longevity

 

🤫 Room 101 — What We’re Banning

We nearly confiscated all bad PowerPoint slides forever…
… but the official Room 101 winner is:

🚫 Harm-reduction messaging that shifts responsibility onto individuals and deepens inequality.
👉 Behaviour change must tackle systems, not shame people.

 

❤️ Conference Vibes

• Sunshine + tapas 🌞🍷

• Inspiration + brilliant humans

• A real sense of movement and momentum

• A tribe found (but everyone’s invited)

Next stop? Montpellier 2026 🇫🇷
(We’ll race you to the plenary hall.)

 

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn

Find Ed Gyde, Katherine Knight, and Ian Fannon over on LinkedIn 

 

🌟 Final Thought

This episode is your postcard from Spain - minus the sangria.
The spark is real. The movement is growing.
Health change is joy-change.

Let’s boost a better world. 💥\

 

To stay up to date on behaviour change in health comms, and public health join BrainFuel over on Substack!