The Campaign

New research shows that skin cancer risk actually builds up over time, so simply being in the sun every day can be as dangerous as getting sunburnt. Given that Queensland is the skin cancer capital of the world, we needed to get this information to teenagers who think it’s okay to be in the sun as long as you don’t get burnt. The problem is teenagers don’t pay much attention to health messages. Luckily, they do pay attention to photos of idiots and ‘fails’. So we developed our own sunburn fails to deliver the message.

Success of the Campaign

Queensland Health considered this campaign one of their most successful youth health campaigns ever. Not only in terms of numbers, but also engagement and targeting. Sunburnfail.com.au received over 10,000 unique visits, however it is estimated that the campaign was shared with over 100,000 young Queenslanders via Facebook (please note, government regulations prevented us having a campaign Facebook page, so even though we used the ‘like’ function to get our message into newsfeeds, we could not collect the likes, nor could we monitor how many times the ads were re-posted). This was supplemented with highly targeted exposure via street posters and street press.

Describe how the campaign/entry was launched and executed across each channel in the order of implementation.

Using targeted online display, mobile and facebook ads, we engaged hard-to-reach Queensland teenagers with humorously sunburnt people on what looked like a sunburn fail site. To see more sunburn fails they clicked ‘like’ which shared the ads with their friends (usually other young Queenslanders) in their facebook newsfeeds. When the teenagers got to sunburnfail.com.au the sunburn fails were just ordinary teenagers doing ordinary outdoor things – because ‘you don’t actually have to get sunburnt to get skin cancer in Queensland’. The site then further explained the issue. The campaign was replicated in youth media such as street press and street posters.