The encyclopedia · Marketing & Brand · Marketing decision · 2024
La Roche-Posay and BMS gave Bondi beach a melanoma that visibly grew
Sun-safety messages weren't landing, so Ogilvy built a melanoma at Sculpture by the Sea that grew day by day—and 2,000 beachgoers got skin checks.
La Roche-Posay · Bristol Myers Squibb
The solution
Australia has one of the world's highest skin cancer rates—two in every three Australians are expected to develop some form of skin cancer in their lifetime, and one life is lost to melanoma every six hours. Yet 74% of 18–30-year-olds believe their risk of getting skin cancer is unlikely, and decades of sun-safety campaigns have not moved the needle.
Ogilvy Sydney, with Glue Society and The Beautiful and Useful Studio, and co-funded by sunscreen brand La Roche-Posay and pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb, created 'The Spot': an evolving sculpture at Sculpture by the Sea on Tamarama Beach that began as a small mole and grew over days into a 15-metre melanoma. Influencer posts and media coverage first asked what was appearing on the beach before the reveal.
A QR code at the sculpture's base led to free skin checks with Skin Check Champions. The installation reached an estimated 450,000 visitors, generated more than 30 million earned media impressions, distributed 40,000 sunscreen samples, and the on-site skin checks—over 2,000 of them—uncovered 500 suspicious moles and 22 melanomas.
Nearly 3,000 people visited La Roche-Posay's landing page for The Spot via the QR code, and Bristol Myers Squibb saw a six-fold increase in enquiries from healthcare professionals about melanoma over a single weekend—engagement that would normally take more than two months to achieve.
Why it worked
- The medium embodied the message: a melanoma that visibly grows made an abstract risk into something people watched happen.
- Placing it on a famous beach at the start of summer put the warning exactly where the risky behaviour occurs.
- The mystery-seeding phase turned social media and news coverage into the campaign's distribution.
- Free skin checks converted attention into immediate action, detecting 22 melanomas in the process.
What can be applied
When a repeated message still doesn't land, stop repeating it: give the danger a physical form where the risk happens. A medium that embodies the problem does what statistics cannot.
Aftermath
The Spot later travelled to Canberra, where more than 100 policymakers viewed it at Parliament House with free skin checks on offer, carrying the melanoma conversation into policy circles. The work won a Silver at Spikes Asia 2025 in Media and further recognition at ADFEST, while the skin checks it triggered detected 22 melanomas.
Sources
- The Spot — ADFEST 2025 winners entry
- 'The Spot': Giant, Growing Melanoma Sculpture Raises Awareness for Skin Safety
- AUNZ Work Of the Week: Ogilvy and Sculptures By The Sea
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.