Every single year, numerous Danes from the cold North head to the south of Europe in the hopes of sunny weather and warmer temperatures. Every third Danes returns to Denmark with a sunburn. Sunburns increase the risk of skin cancer and Malignant Melanoma. In fact, the number of Danes that get sunburned on their vacation has increased by six percentage points from 2012 to 2015. That is a problem. Especially because 90% of all types of skin cancer can be prevented by something as simple as sensible sun behavior.

The most crucial goal for the Danish Cancer Society’s and TrygFronden’s annual Sun Campaign, was hence to increase knowledge about sun protection amongst the Danes and get them to change their tanning habits when going on vacation. Especially because the Danes are increasingly exposed when heading south, due to the fact that the sun’s rays are often much stronger than in Denmark.

Our idea was based around activating those who are most likely to know the most about sensible sun behavior: The locals inhabiting the Danes favorite holiday destinations. And so, together with a choir of sun burnt Danes and Mikael Berthelsen, a well-known Danish radio- and TV personality, we sent out an appeal to all the locals in Thailand, Spain, Greece, Italy and France: An appeal to help the Danes and remind them to use sunscreen. Our appeal was pretty straightforward: ‘Help a Dane’.

The strategy was to create as much attention and publicity as possible about the Danes’ sun habits internationally, so that the Danish media would finally pick up the story and start focusing on the subject. Because if there is anything that can get us Danes out of our lounge chairs, it’s when the rest of the world is talking about us. Hence, we didn’t create a campaign directly targeted the Danes, which we would normally do. Instead we turned our focus towards the local population at the Danes favorite holiday destinations and begged them to help the Danes.

This turned out the be a successful strategy, and nothing could really have prepared us for the enormous and overwhelming reception, that the appeal-films received in their respective countries. The campaign recruited almost 12.000 Help a Dane ambassadors abroad, and the films were shared more than 200.000 times. In total the Help a Dane campaign received a ROMI of 820%. But most importantly, the campaign managed to increase the Danes knowledge about sun protection with 42% - and an entire 63% of Danes took the sun protection advice to heart and changes their behavior in the sun, after having watched the campaign.