Getting ready for the summer?
Can you really get a tan sitting at your computer? It might sound too good to be true, especially for a society seemingly ever more obsessed with changing its skin colour, and yet that is exactly the promise on a new website www.computertan.com.
Visit the site and you will, eventually, discover that not only is computer tanning impossible, but in fact the site is part of a campaign to raise awareness of the risks of skin cancer on behalf of the Karen Clifford Skin Cancer Charity.
Ten years ago my inbox constantly creaked under a flood of emails forwarded from friends that covered everything from a joke I’d heard a hundred times before to lists outlining why women were better than men, dogs better than cats, things to do in the office to brighten up your day and so forth. It didn’t take long for organisations to get wise to this phenomenon. And the concept of ‘viral marketing’ was born. A piece of communication that could be sent out to a small group of people who would then forward it on at exponential rates.
For many organisations the concept of viral has become a bit like the Holy Grail of marketing – ‘let’s do a viral’ – you know you want one, you know it has untold powers and yet you’re not quite sure what it looks like or where to find it.
I think the computertan site is a great example of how to do things properly. Set up by McCann Erickson and Rubber Republic and supported by PR and advertising activity, the hoax company attracted over 30,000 visits to the website in the first 24 hours. That’s pretty impressive in anyone’s book.
As a social marketing campaign tackling what is a massive issue for the UK (more people die of skin cancer in the UK than in Australia, five a day), I think it works primarily for five different reasons:
It is brilliantly and intuitively targeted: what better way to reach those most at risk of skin cancer than by enticing them with the promise of innovative new tanning services. A very digital honey trap. There’s nothing like the promise of something enticing to grab our interest.
It is incredibly simple: the best ideas are always the ones you can write down in one or two sentences, there is nothing over-engineered about this, it’s a very easy concept to buy in to. The more you think about this the less it works, so it has to seem perfectly reasonable from the outset.
It is well considered and executed: the website itself would not take long to design and build, but despite this every detail has been thought through to create a genuinely believable corporate website, right down to the fake products and supporting information. It’s this kind of attention to detail that really makes the difference.
It gets the message across with a punch: this campaign has a very serious message, the site builds you up, ‘calibrating’ your screen, switching on the tubes of light and creating a sense of expectation then, just as you’re imagining the tan you’re going to get, bang, up pops the message that UV exposure kills along with five very graphic pictures of skin cancer.
It takes us on a journey: rather than a static site with some pictures and text about the risk of skin cancer, this site includes the audience within the narrative, we’re participants in the story. The premise of all stories is ultimately personal change and transformation, so what better way to get a message about changing behaviour over to a large number of people?
There is no doubting the very real power of viral marketing, but as the old stories tell us, the search for the Holy Grail can be a dangerous one for the uninitiated. Of course, for those who know what they’re looking for, it can be the ultimate reward.