B&T’s Campaign Of The Month Wrapped: Queensland Health’s Frightening Skin Cancer Campaign, Via CHEP

At the height of summer, B&T crowned CHEP’s “You Do The 5. You Survive” campaign for Queensland Health our Campaign of the Month winner in December.

Now, with temperatures falling (at least in Sydney), B&T caught up with Shahedah Sabdia, senior marketing officer, strategic communications at Queensland Health and Phil Shearer, CHEP’s ECD to find out how the campaign performed.

The campaign saw the agency take a fresh look at the classic “Slip, Slop Slap” messaging to keep Australians safe in the sun by recasting the giant orange orb as a mysterious killer.

B&T: You took a new look at the “Slip, Slap, Slop” format with “You Do The 5. You Survive.” Was the public getting tired of the old formula?

Shahedah Sabdia: This campaign is aimed at 18- to 34-year-olds who are the least likely to adopt sun-safe behaviours compared to other age groups. They didn’t necessarily grow up with the “Slip. Slop. Slap” jingle playing in their heads like older audiences did.

Our extensive consumer research also told us that whilst they will often adopt sun-safe behaviours when they can be prepared for it – like going to the beach – there are lots of times they forget, find it too hard, don’t think it’s necessary for just a short time, or simply don’t believe that the effort of being sun safe is worth the benefit. This age group have a strongly held misconception that skin cancer is only a problem as you age. In actual fact, for an Australian aged 20 to 39, if you’re going to be diagnosed with cancer, it’s most likely to be melanoma. So we needed to do something out of the ordinary to attract their attention and make the five protective behaviours personally relevant and actionable.

Phil Shearer: We leant into the horror movie genre with this work, but the work isn’t meant to be scary. It’s designed to entertain – that’s the hook to grab their attention. Then we hold that attention while educating them to slip, slop, slap, seek and slide.

B&T: The creative approach is quite out there for a public health campaign. How did you manage to get the client on side?
PS: Queensland Health came to us looking for a different approach given the audience. So we didn’t approach it like an ordinary brief. We briefed creative teams across the CHEP network to develop a heap of top-line ideas – I think there were fifteen and they all had some merit – which we shared with the client. It was fun. Then, collaboratively, we whittled it down to three which went into concept testing. Then we used the findings of the research to help us adapt the one that consumers indicated would be the most effective – while also drawing on our expertise and instincts around what would really cut through.

SS: It also helped that at least one of our team was a horror movie buff, so we didn’t need to be sold on the tropes of the genre and how they would lend themselves to the issue at hand.

B&T: What metrics and KPIs have you used to assess the campaign’s impact and how has it performed?

SS: Monitoring the effectiveness of behaviour change campaigns takes years, not months. In our evaluation, we use a combination of metrics to measure not just media channel performance, but also changing consumer attitudes and behaviours, and how we’re tracking towards long-term goals.

Our early evaluation shows that we achieved a strong cut-through with the target audience, with 18- to 34-year-olds much more likely than other audiences to recall the campaign itself and its key messages.

When measured against the social marketing benchmark of Affective Memory Potential – that is, the campaign’s potential to impact measured through novelty, relevance and affective (emotional) impact – the campaign scored well on all three measures and it had notably higher scores for ‘novelty’ and ‘relevance’ than for affectiveness.

This means the campaign did well for the target audience in both grabbing their attention and in providing information relevant to them – which is really what we set out to achieve.

For almost all media channels the campaign exceeded benchmarks, with social media delivering an astonishing 23 million impressions. Anecdotally too, we can see from the engagement on social media the target audience loved the idea of satirising a horror film and found it engaging and memorable.

PS: Completion rates of the online videos were very high which is a trend we have found across various clients when we lean into entertainment as a vehicle to carry a message. On YouTube, the longest video – the full 30-second ‘trailer’ – actually had the highest completion rate. And more than 100,00 Queenslanders clicked through to the website where we were able to deliver even more compelling messaging.

SS: Actually, one of the surprisingly strong performers that over-delivered on click-through rate was Weatherzone. We worked with our media agency to tap into UV-triggered ads, meaning the messaging was served to Queenslanders when the UV levels in their specific area were three or above – meaning sun protection is recommended.

This campaign also rolled out across audio and OOH. How did you have to adapt the creative to suit these formats?

PS: The beauty of parodying a horror movie launch is that you can use the media conventions of a movie launch to your advantage. Our OOH looked like film posters. The audio sounded like radio ads for an upcoming film.

B&T: There has been much written about tanning in Australia recently. How challenging is it to create public health campaigns with cut-through in this environment?

SS: Cutting through with inconvenient truths is always challenging. Tanning is a tricky one because it speaks to some very heavily ingrained cultural beliefs around what is and isn’t appealing or attractive – and knowing about the risks and harms doesn’t have an impact in the same way it might for other things.

From our research, we know that communicating when the five protective behaviours are needed and trying to make tanning unfashionable are different sides of the same coin. While it’s all with a mind to reducing the incidence of skin cancer in Queensland, one campaign can’t achieve everything.

We made the decision to focus on emphasising the relevance and reality of the risk for this audience, knowing that we could do it well, and knowing that others like the Australian Department of Health and Cancer Council Australia are doing some amazing, hard-hitting work to reshape Australians’ attitudes towards tanning.

Check out the rest of B&T’s Campaigns of the Month here:

• How To Launch A Nameless Car – KIA & Innocean Drive Off With B&T’s Campaign Of The Month
• Tastes More Than OK: Pepsi’s Coke Attack Ad Named B&T’s February Campaign Of The Month
• Uber One & Special Serve Up A Winner For B&T’s Campaign Of The Month, January 2024
• B&T’s Campaign Of The Month December 2023 – CHEP Delivers A Shocker For Queensland Health
• B&T’s Campaign Of The Month November 2023 – Innocean’s Powerful White Ribbon Work
• B&T’s Campaign Of the Month October 2023 — Sam Kerr Leads Red Cross & Uber’s Clothing Drive
• B&T’s Campaign Of The Month – The Monkeys’ Telstra Epic Takes The Win

Campaign credits:

Client: Queensland Health
Senior Marketing Officer: Shahedah Sabdia
A/Marketing Team Leader: Hillary Bell
Marketing Manager: Heather Mcgregor

Agency: CHEP Network Brisbane
Managing Partner: Christine Gannon
Account Director: Alexandra Pavlos
Executive Creative Director: Phil Shearer
Senior Art Director: Shay Devery
Senior Copywriter: Chelsea Parks
Senior Producer: Elena Szymanski

Production Company: The Chop Shop
Director: Lav Bodnaruk + Mike Mier
DOP: Lav Bodnaruk
Post-production: The Chop Shop
Offline Editor: Steph Liquorish
Online Artist: Caleb De Leon
Colourist: Caleb De Leon
Sound Design: Folklore Sound Design
Sound Engineer: Thom Kellar

Media Agency: EssenceMediacom