In this exclusive op-ed, MoleMap ANZ chief marketing officer Duncan Armour explains how a social campaign built around people’s future ambitions became a broader brand platform, delivering record skin check bookings and challenging the healthcare category’s reliance on fear-based marketing. He shares the lessons from phase one and why the next step is turning emotional connection into action.
Every skin check brand in Australia and New Zealand faces the same problem, and it usually coincides with the initial drop in temperature.
The days get shorter, the jumpers come out, and the feeling that skin cancer is something to worry only during the Summer months – interest in skin checks tends to go with it.
For years, the category’s answer has been to dial up the risk factors – more warnings, more statistics and more fear. This winter, we actually tried the opposite: selling the future, not the check.
Winter is when people plan. Holidays, marathons, weddings, the next promotion… We all carry a mental scrapbook of milestones that haven’t happened yet.
Working with our social agency Bread Agency, we built ‘Map Your Future’ around one simple idea: a skin check isn’t a chore, it’s how you protect the future you’re planning. But the real work was done by people.
They told us what they were mapping their skin for: to see more of the world, to run a marathon, to watch their kids grow up and become parents. Werner, a parkrun regular, became one of our most-watched stories with 200k organic views on Instagram.
Map Your Future started as a social campaign. It quickly became our brand platform, running across on-demand TV, radio, billboards, bus stops, retail screens and social in both countries from July to September.
What did it deliver?
We invested the most for any campaign in our history in media across Australia and New Zealand. The campaign was seen and heard more than 34 million times. More importantly, our modelling estimates it drove around 2,000 extra bookings, bringing in roughly 2.8 times what we spent on media.
It helped us achieve our best July to September quarter on record with more than 25,639 skin check bookings, up 20 per cent from last year.
I’ll be the first to say the campaign didn’t do that alone. Paid search, new partnerships and automated recalls all played their part, so we only credit ‘Map Your Future’ with the bookings above our always-on activity. Honest measurement matters more to me than a big number.
Social did what we hoped it would. The 64 posts drew 1.3 million video views and almost 10,000 social engagements.
Three things we learned
Authentic storytelling outperforms branded messaging every time. Our best-performing month came from stripping away the corporate polish, the minimal branding, no heavy sales copy, just real people speaking for themselves.
Focus beats spread. Talk radio in Sydney and Melbourne drew about 10.5 website visits per ad, against 1.6 in Adelaide. Most of our clinics are in NSW and Victoria, so that’s where our Australian radio and outdoor money goes next.
Emotion needs a next step. This is the one we learned a lesson from. Phase one built feeling and awareness, but our above-the-line creative didn’t always tell people what to do next. A beautiful idea that leaves people unsure how to act leaves bookings on the table.
Phase two
Phase two launches on the 1st of November and runs through the summer peak, with an increase of 20 per cent on media compared to phase one already booked across both markets.
The platform stays. The tone stays. What changes is that every ad now ends with a clear instruction: ‘Book your skin check’ and we are dialling up the emotional connection with real images of real people and dreams across many channels.
We’re also leaning harder into what worked: more peak-time radio and live reads in NSW and Victoria, our own story content over paid influencers, and outdoor that shows real people in real-life moments, built to be recognised quickly and searched for. We’ll measure it exactly the same way as phase one, so we can compare like for like, and report back after February.
Why this matters beyond MoleMap
I’ve worked in Health marketing for 20 years and it has long leaned on fear factors, because fear is easy to brief.
The reality is that people don’t plan their lives around what might go wrong, they plan around what they want to achieve instead. What they will gain over what they may lose. Connect your category to that, and you stop being a box to tick and start resonating with people and families while being part of the future people are building.
‘Let us map your skin, so you can map your future’ started as a tagline. It’s now how we run the brand.
