Small spots are easily overlooked. Take the period at the end of that first sentence, for instance. You barely even noticed it.
Skin cancer nonprofit Melanoma Know More wants to change how we see our small spots. In a campaign ramping up as summer winds down, the advocacy group teamed up with marketing agency Doner to bring attention to melanoma through the ubiquitous period. (They really are everywhere.)
Doner’s team did some interactive coding to turn periods into tiny awareness videos when readers hover their mouse over them. The campaign launched this week in partnership with lifestyle website POPSUGAR and will run through the end of September.
The enhanced periods are appearing on all of POPSUGAR’s health, wellness, and beauty articles. When readers roll over the periods, up pops a video sharing one of five tips for detecting melanoma with a link to the Melanoma Know More website.
Why the lowly period? “Because we asked, how do you tell this story without using pictures that are graphic and gross and that people don’t want to look at?” said Doner executive creative director Brad Emmett. “These tiny little spots can seem benign until you get them checked. It’s about these spots that you don’t really notice until it’s called to your attention that there’s something going on there. And we thought, ‘What is a little spot that you take for granted?’”
In the videos, a black dot contorts into irregular shapes and changes color, showing the signs to look for in a cancerous mole, like irregular edges, large diameter, and varying color, without showing graphic pictures.
The articles also have a simple, eye-catching animation when the reader scrolls down to the text: the periods enlarge and seem to cascade down the page, indicating to the reader that something is different about this article and prompting them to roll over the periods to find out more.
The pop-up videos also share the ABCDE method of detecting skin cancer and remind people to get checked if they have these signs.
Doner chose POPSUGAR because the campaign is aiming to raise awareness of skin cancer among millennial women, especially after a summer of sunbathing. Part of the effort is also to extend skin cancer awareness beyond the summer months, when organizations tend to ramp up warnings and encourage sunscreen use to prevent skin cancer.
“People can get burned worse in the winter than in summer when they ski and they don’t wear protection,” Emmett said. “Skin cancer isn’t like, I laid out in the sun this year and I got skin cancer. It’s something from your past, like you may have been burned when you were a kid, that appears later.”
This is the first campaign Doner has done with Melanoma Know More. The pro-bono campaign will run on POPSUGAR through September 30.
What’s more, this is not just an average campaign for the agency; for some Doner staffers, it’s personal. Emmett and associate creative director Mark Adler are skin cancer survivors.
“I have a real heart for skin cancer awareness because I survived skin cancer due to early detection and I always wanted to do something for melanoma awareness,” Emmett said. “A lot of people won’t go to the Melanoma Know More site if they don’t have skin cancer. If we just get more people going to it and finding out about skin cancer, they might just be a little more conscious of it; in a way, you’re potentially saving a life.”
