I've listed in the past core principles for confronting the AIDS crisis. Here is an expanded approach of how a simple mind might consider AIDS:

• AIDS is the biggest problem facing the planet today (or so says the Copenhagen Consensus);


• A vaccine is probably 15 years away at best (or so estimates Paul Farmer and many others), so it won't play a role in the next 100+ million infections;


• Drug treatments will greatly lag behind need for many years. Drugs might lessen the rate of growth of AIDS if tied to prevention, but will increase infection rates if programs are implemented poorly;


• The only hope of containing AIDS is through prevention. Societies need to be "immunized" against AIDS through education.


• While the mass media and training programs can be helpful in prevention education, there is no better way to spread important messages than by word of mouth through family and friends.


• There is no better way to motivate people to tell their friends and family about AIDS than to pay them money to do so.

My conclusion is that the best way to confront the planet's biggest problem is to pay people to tell their friends and families about AIDS

I'm not sure what this means.  I'm not aware of social marketing programs that rely on payments, especially in some sort of "multi-level marketing" format.  I've heard no discussion of payments in AIDS education.  I understand that there are myriad political, financial and social obstacles to paid prevention programs. 

I also know, however, that paid programs are highly effective in many diverse contexts, the amount of money necessary to motivate action is relatively inconsequential (I won't run numbers here -- but think ten cents per referral), and that paid programs can be highly controversial (which isn't necessarily bad in education programs).  I expect the next step in designing smart efforts would be to offer a competition to policymakers around the world to design an effective AIDS education campaign that included payments as incentives -- and see what the most knowledgeable people on the front lines had to say.