McCann Erickson

McCann Salt Lake City for SKCIN.



The pseudo-infomercial and website shown above were created by McCann, but they were part of a "fake" campaign intended to educate people on the consequences of tanning and the dangers of skin cancer. Today, "about 35% of 17-year-old girls use tanning machines, an FDA report says. People under 30 who use tanning machines increase their risk of skin cancer by 75%, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer" (data gathered from an article on the Skin Cancer Foundation website). Tanning is to our generation what cigarettes were to our grandparents; soon kids will come home from school, having learned how deadly tanning beds were, and question how their own parents could have been so dumb to lay in a bed, being pounded by UV rays and think nothing bad would happen to them.

The day has finally come that the FDA has gotten involved in an attempt to regulate who has access to tanning beds and how much UV exposure they are getting. So now people don't have an excuse; there is evidence that it IS dangerous, but people are still doing it. Just as people continued to smoke cigarettes even after evidence surfaced about the life-threatening dangers.

With this campaign, McCann did something very unexpected but also very risky; they tricked the public. They created deceptive advertising in the most literal sense by encouraging people to visit a website that allowed them to tan from their computer screen...or iphone if you felt so inclined. Therefore, this campaign also helped prove how stupid people can be; the ComputerTan website generated over a million page visits from over 9,000 cities in about 180 countries. really world. really?

The site and the video are extremely cheesy; they have the same tone as the recession aggression bag viral ad from Y&R, but this time, people didn't think it was just a joke. When viewers visited the site, they were shown information on skin cancer and how tanning heightens your risk for the disease. Hopefully, people not only felt dumb for believing something like that would work, but they also realized how dumb it is to subject your body to something that will cut your life short.