Skin Cancer Awareness Month campaign reaches billions!
May is Skin Cancer Awareness Month, and in 2024 the Academy once again undertook a robust effort to spread awareness to the general public. Similar content did very well in 2022, did even better in 2023, and shows no signs of stopping in 2024!
During the month, the Academy successfully secured 851 placements in print, TV, and online media, with an audience of over 100,000, focusing on survey data highlighting the public’s knowledge and attitudes toward sun protection, which generated more than 2 billion impressions. Notable coverage included a CBS News story about the survey featuring AAD President Seemal R. Desai, MD, FAAD, and articles featuring findings pertaining to Gen Z sun protection habits in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
The Academy also released a variety of Skin Cancer Awareness Month-related content on its social media channels that featured board-certified dermatologists discussing hot topics and trends. In total, this content generated 11.8 million impressions and 1.4 million engagements.
Some of the top-performing social media content includes:
In addition, the Academy published a new video on its YouTube channel called “How to treat a sunburn: Dermatologists’ tips.” The video was part of the ongoing “Your Dermatologist Knows” series, which offers the public helpful tips to properly care for their skin, hair, and nails. Within the first 10 days, the average viewership of the series was surging, even higher than usual for our popular AAD videos.
While the main goal of these efforts is to position board-certified dermatologists as the experts on skin cancer diagnosis and treatment, a secondary goal is to direct the public to the content on aad.org/public, so that we can ensure the information they’re getting is as accurate and up to date as possible. These efforts paid off! There were over 400,000 new pageviews from over 280,000 new visitors in May, and AAD skin cancer content generated 11 Google search snippets and 63 ranking keywords, with the number of keywords growing each week. Many of the Google search snippets were about in-depth content on melanoma, further positioning board-certified dermatologists as the go-to experts for diagnosing and treating skin cancer.
