Help a Dane

Danish Cancer Society & Trygfonden wanted Danes to change their sun protection habits. But despite numerous sun campaigns Danes had been reluctant to listen and continued to lobster-bake themselves when travelling. But when the world talks about Danes, we always tend to pay more attention.

Insight: Danes love to hear the world talk about them.

Based on this key insight the creative idea was to create a direct marketing campaign that wasn’t aimed at our target audience.

To change a bad habit for the better, we got the world talking by sending messages to the Danes’ favorite holiday destinations, in local languages: Please help Danes to protect themselves!

Rollout

This appeal was sent through social media channels in a hero film hosted by Danish celebrity Mikael Bertelsen accompanied by a choir of sunburned Danes.

Overnight, thousands of locals from Spain to Thailand signed up on our campaign website to become Help a Dane volunteers.

On the site, we engaged them directly by educating them on sun safety for fair Nordic skin types. Campaign material was also distributed to popular tourist spots, and replies started pouring in; Local businesses, hotels, pharmacies, and dermatologists joined our cause.

Danish Media was fast to pick up the hype and return it to Denmark as news stories, quickly making the campaign a trending topic on social media.

Help a Dane grew from a PR stunt to an actual movement, but most importantly Danes actually changed their sun habits this time.

• 12,000 official volunteers
• Campaign ROMI of 820%
• 200,000 shares
• 2.4 billion media impressions

As intended, the campaign influenced the target audience through the funnel. Effects exceeded goals and made actual change happen.

• 42% increase in knowledge about sun protection among Danes
• 63% of the Danes took the campaign message to heart and changed their sun habits