Bill Matassoni

“A friend told me about a marketing firm she had encountered. She thought I might fit in. “They’re different and you’re different.” Jack Porter and Bill Novelli founded and ran the firm. They both had been successful New York ad men, but they decided they wanted to do something good for the world and saw social marketing* as a way to do it. Their firm, Porter Novelli, had clients such as the National Cancer Institute and the National High Blood Pressure Education Program. Social marketing is just like regular marketing except behavior is more important than money. You pay for some benefit—or cure— with your behavior or lifestyle rather than cash. Of course, you may have to buy drugs to treat whatever is trying to kill you or causing you pain, but that is a small part of the contract.

I liked the idea of what Porter Novelli did. It wasn’t just business and numbers. I met Novelli and we hit it off. We were both, after all, poor Italian kids from western Pennsylvania. We played soccer and, of course, we were crazy fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers. No surprise, I got the job. I spent the next two years learning how to convince people to keep treating their high blood pressure. Detection wasn’t the issue. Recidivism was the problem. People stopped taking their drugs, started eating too much salt again, regained the weight they had lost, etc. It was a tough sell telling people they had an incurable disease that was probably going to kill them and all they could do to prolong their lives was change their lifestyle.”

* Social marketing is the use of marketing theory, skills and practices to achieve positive social change, by solving complex social problems.