PROJECT SNAPSHOT: NEW ZEALAND CANCER SOCIETY SUNSCREEN CAMPAIGN

Despite the Cancer Society’s heritage, their sunscreen was suffering from the ‘charity trap’- viewed as a worthy donation rather than a high-performance product. In a retail landscape cluttered with global beauty labels, the brand was losing ground to ‘one-size-fits-all’ marketing.

We needed to move the brand from the skincare aisle to the survival category. The strategy was built on a gritty local reality: the NZ sun is uniquely aggressive, and global beauty brands aren't built to handle it. We realised that by reframing the sun as a local adversary, we could reposition NZCS sunscreen as a specialist product specifically engineered for NZ conditions.

To match the high-production values of global competitors on a shoestring budget, I adopted a ‘Department of One’ approach, utilising AI to produce professional-grade visuals and campaign assets that punch well above their budget.