Trust in Action: Social Marketing, Influence, and Wicked Problems

Join TEDxSeattle and the Northwest Social Marketing Association for an interactive TEDxSeattle event exploring how trust, information, and community shape behavior for social good—and what “influence done right” looks like in practice.

This TEDxSeattle event is intentionally designed to shorten the distance between you and our expert speakers. Three idea-driven talks are paired with facilitated small-group conversation and audience-generated questions, creating space not just to listen, but to actively engage with the ideas, the speakers, and one another..

Here's how it works: 20/20/20 - Present/Process/Power

Each speaker shares a different aspect of social marketing (about 20 minutes). Then you’ll have time at your table (about 20 minutes) to process what you heard and shape questions together. Finally, your questions power a live Q&A (about 20 minutes) with the speaker you just heard—so the conversation reflects what the room is genuinely curious about.

After the three speaker segments and lunch, the speakers and a guest facilitator will take your questions even further in a lively panel discussion about what’s next for social marketing.

Your Curious Mind

This event is for people like you: curious, impact-minded, and not afraid of complex problems—community members, nonprofit and public-sector professionals, and students. You’ll leave ready to influence responsibly and think critically in a world shaped by persuasion, power, and complex systems.

By joining us, you can expect:

• Wicked problems, clarified — why complex challenges resist simple fixes.
• Trust, decoded — how trust shapes behavior across communities and systems.
• Everyday persuasion awareness — how campaigns, media, tech, and policy affect choices (and how to think about it).
• A set of guiding ideas — practical lenses from social marketing, systems thinking, and behavioral science—designed to deepen understanding and point toward further learning or use in your context.
• That TEDx Spark — new insights sparked through guided reflection and conversation with a community of curious TEDxSeattle attendees.

Many of our current social challenges—public health, our changing climate, safety, misinformation, and community trust—are what social change practitioners you'll hear from call “wicked problems.” These are complex, deeply interconnected issues with no single cause, no clear endpoint, and no one-size-fits-all solution. They are shaped by human behavior, social norms, power dynamics, lived experience, and systems that adapt as we attempt to change them.

These Wicked Problems are especially difficult because shifting population-level behaviors isn’t simply a matter of better information or stronger messaging. Interventions can have unintended consequences, progress is often nonlinear, and strategies that work in one context may fail in another.

In this context, influence becomes especially fraught. The tools used by social marketers, policymakers, technologists, and institutions to shape behavior can support the common good—or cross into manipulation when they bypass ethical norms, exploit fear, or obscure tradeoffs in the name of efficiency or control.

In this event you'll hear what it really takes to move the needle on wicked problems without sacrificing trust. Drawing on real-world examples from public health, traffic and pedestrian safety, and other topics, our speakers examine how social marketing processes, analysis, and various techniques build trust, align incentives, reshape environments, and support sustainable positive change.

A TEDxSeattle Salon is a highly interactive TEDx experience designed for active attendee exploration.Each Salon explores a focused theme through short talks and audience discussion.

Unlike a traditional “one-way” conference or panel—where information is delivered to you—a TEDxSeattle Salon is intentionally “two-way.” You’ll hear from speakers then pause and process what you just heard, discuss it with the people around you, and deliver your questions and reactions back to the speakers. The result is deeper connection to the ideas—and to what they mean for our communities and our future.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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