The World Social Marketing conference aims to bring together social marketing practitioners, academics and policy makers to capture and share good practice in social marketing and in so doing advance both the theory and practice of social marketing. The conference also has a key role in facilitating dialog and exchange between academics, practitioners and policy makers and people working on social marketing programmes on different topics and in different regions and countries.In this edition we have a number of papers that reflect some of the key themes presented and debated in Washington.