How advertising and media are priming us for skin cancer

In August 2018 I was diagnosed with Stage IV melanoma, it was in my bones, and I was riddled with it. I was told the historic prognosis of a diagnosis like mine was 12 – 24 months. Under the care of Professor Georgina Long I had immunotherapy treatment and just 97 days from diagnosis I had no active cancer. Miraculous!

Only months later my sons, 18 and 21 years old, came home sunburnt and close family members and friends were posting photos on social media of themselves sunbaking. WTF!? They had all known what I had been through and knew only too well I was lucky to be alive. What was going on? What was it that was holding more power over them than the threat of death?

Not long after I went back to work, I was reviewing creative executions for a new advertising campaign when I was stopped in my tracks. One of the executions was of a young male sunbaking by a pool with a headline promoting the positive aesthetic of a tan. My body responded with a racing heart and a dry mouth. I knew I could never approve that execution and I realised that the industry in which I had spent a 30-year career was a part of our skin cancer problem.

Doctor Caroline Koblenzer who had a career interest in the interaction of the skin and the psyche found that the underlying meanings attributed to having tanned skin are a more powerful motivator than the risks associated with tanning – this is exactly what I had seen play out in my own family and friends.

She went on to say, and many other researchers make the same argument, that to change tanning behaviours we must change cultural norms.

Advertising and media are the most powerful way to create and spread cultural norms¹, to make a sustainable long-term impact on our skin cancer issue we need these industries to step up and help lead the change.

Research confirms that there is a direct link between seeing tanned bodies in media and advertising and an individual’s subsequent attitudes and intentions to tanning and tanning behaviour². By just seeing tanned people in the media a value is placed on tanning which leads to increased sun exposure and less sun protection³. Social media is particularly influential – the more time an adolescent spends on it the more likely they are to have increased sun exposure, less sun protection and higher skin tone dissatisfaction⁴

There is a plethora of research reinforcing these findings, so where are the media and advertising guidelines that deal with sun protection? They don’t exist.

Bear in mind that the International Agency on Research in Cancer has determined that solar UV radiation, i.e. the sun, is a grade 1 carcinogen. That’s the same category given to tobacco. The advertising and media industries have free reign to show behaviours and set cultural norms which can cause cancer. Are we happy to continue to allow this?

Whilst we have had world leading public health campaigns for the last 40 years via the Slip, Slop, Slap and SunSmart initiatives, these are operating in a media context which is consistently undermining the sun safe message.
Last Summer the Australian Government and Cancer Council Australia launched a $7.3 million campaign to ‘End the Trend’ of suntanning. The campaign used social media content creators to target younger Australians. The strategy was spot on.

Marie-Claire was one of the media partners for the campaign, on March 28th they ran an article about influencer Martha Kalifitidis who ditched her bronzer for a week to make a point about sun tanning. Yet on March 4th Marie-Claire had run a paid media promotion with Seafolly which included several aspirational images of tanned bikini clad women. Competing messages, confusing.

And what about Love Island, while I’ve never watched an episode, I’ve seen enough of the ads to understand the contestants spend most of their time sitting around sunbaking.

Public health campaigns with relatively low media budgets cannot compete with the scale and influence of the whole advertising and media industry. Every time an image of a tanned attractive person is seen in the media, on any platform, it encourages tanning behaviours and reinforces cultural norms.

Rather than reinforcing these norms, imagine what could be achieved if we leveraged the power of the advertising and media industries to help reshape them by being more responsible with the images they chose to show and the narratives they told. Including sun protection in the advertising Code of Ethics would be a great place to start.

1. H Cho, S Lee and K Wilson, ‘Magazine exposure, tanned women stereotypes, and tanning attitudes’, Body Image, 2010, 7(4):364–367, doi: 10.1016/j.bodyim.2010.04.002; M Tiggemann and ASlater, ‘Thin ideals in music television: a source of social comparison and body dissatisfaction’, International Journal of Eating Disorders, 2003, 35(1):48–58, doi:10.1002/eat.10214 [↩]
2. JE McWhirter and L Hoffman-Goetz, ‘Systematic review of population-based studies on the impact of images on UV attitudes and behaviours’, Health Promotion International, 2013, 30(2):397– 410, doi: 10.1093/heapro/dat031; K White, N Robinson, R Young, P Anderson, M Hyde, S Greenbank, J Keane, T Rolfe, P Vardon and D Baskerville, ‘Exploring young people’s beliefs and images about sun safety’, Youth Studies Australia, 2008, 27(4):43–49 [↩]
3. G Cafri, JK Thompson and PB Jacobsen, ‘Appearance reasons for tanning mediate the relationship between media influence and UV exposure and sun protection’, Archives of Dermatology, 2006, 142(8):1065–1086, doi:10.1001/archderm.142.8.1067 [↩]
4. J Mingoia, A Hutchinson, DH Gleaves, N Corsini and C Wilson, ‘Use of social networking sites and associations with skin tone dissatisfaction, sun exposure, and sun protection in a sample ofAustralian adolescents’, Psychology & Health, 2017, 32(12):1502–1517, doi: 10.1080/08870446.2017.1347788 [↩]