Every year thousands of Danes travel to sunny destinations on holiday. Unfortunately, many of them return home with sunburns that increase the risk of skin cancer, and every day a Dane dies from cancer in the skin. But how do we create awareness about sun protection when Danes are hundreds or even thousands of miles away on holiday?

Denmark is a small country, and we love to hear what the World says about us, so our idea was to

use the universal language of song to plead with the locals at tourist hot spots to “Help a Dane” avoid a sunburn.

We collaborated with international artists on the Danes’ favorite holiday destinations to create five original music videos representing each country.

The songs and music videos worked as musical PSAs creating awareness about sun protection and recruited locals to help Danes in the sun.

There’s one thing you can’t avoid when you’re holidaying in the sun: Summer hits. They’re a crucial part of the summer vibe, and they’re played everywhere. Restaurants, bars, night clubs, beach lounges, even taxis. So, to create a campaign that could break out of paid media and follow Danish tourists around on their holiday, we created the sound of the summer: Musical PSAs. We collaborated with international artists from popular holiday destinations to create a buzz around the songs, and we used a mix of PR and direct to get the songs played on local radio, by local DJ’s and on various tv shows. The use of local languages and local artists was a deliberate trick to get attention from the media and social media users. This in turn provided us with a lot of reactions and content that we could use to target the Danes back in Denmark.

Local production companies, directors and artists from tourist hot spots created five extremely different music videos each with a strong local flavor. Together, they’re a varied and visually-rich feast built around common themes like wearing sunscreen and sun hats.

Supported by a carefully orchestrated media-mix the catchy songs and humorous videos went viral and got picked up by primetime news, and the songs were played in heavy rotation at tourist hot spots, on social media and on spotify. Overnight, Danish sun habits became talk of the town.

Most importantly, 67% say they now remember sun protection on holiday as a result of the campaign.

53% say they now know more about how to protect themselves to avoid sunburns on holiday.

The campaign generated 231 million media impressions.

The total number of local Help a Dane volunteers grew to 12.386.

The music videos also sparked an abundance of user-generated videos, replies and content, and 190.589 social interactions.