AN ICE CREAM VAN THAT SOLD NO ICE CREAM.
Ireland has one of the highest skin cancer rates in the world and a population that does not believe it needs sun cream. So we put Cien in an ice cream van and sent it to the beach.
THE CHALLENGE
Ireland is one of the worst places in the world to have skin. It has one of the highest rates of skin cancer anywhere, three quarters of the population have the skin type that burns rather than tans, and it has the lowest melanoma survival rate in Europe. Most likely to burn, least likely to survive it.
And almost nobody here thinks sun cream is for them. The HSE’s own campaign has to spell out that the sun is strong from April to September even when it is overcast, because people read cloud as safety. Sun cream in Ireland is a holiday product. It lives in the aisle with the travel adaptors and it gets bought before you go somewhere else.
Lidl had a second problem on top of that one. Cien is own-brand. People will buy Lidl’s bread without a thought, but you are asking a parent to put a cheap own-brand lotion on a child’s skin instead of the one they already trust. That is not an awareness problem, and no amount of media buys its way past it. The only thing that answers it is the product in someone’s hand.
THE APPROACH
We built the Sun Cream Van. An ice cream van that sells no ice cream.
The ice cream van is the one vehicle in Ireland a crowd forms around without being asked. Nobody needs persuading to walk towards it. Children drag their parents. And the moment you are queuing at one is precisely the moment you are standing outside, in the open, at the hottest part of the afternoon. The icon of Irish summer is also the instant of maximum exposure.
So we took the object that means treat yourself and filled it with the thing nobody wants to think about. People came for what they recognised and left with what they actually needed. The surprise does the arguing: you do not have to explain it to anyone, and the trick stays kind, because what is behind the door is more use on a hot day than the thing that brought you over.
It had to move, and it was scheduled around the weather rather than around a calendar. An Irish summer is not a season, it is a scatter of unpredictable good days, and a stand in a fixed place on a fixed date will spend half its time handing out sun cream in the rain. Three or four stops a day, following the people, going to where the burning was actually happening that afternoon.
The team did not hand out samples. They demonstrated how much you actually need, which is the step everyone skips. That turns a supermarket into something useful rather than promotional, and it is the only way an own-brand earns the right to be trusted on a health product.
THE DAYS
THE RESULTS
Four days in June 2025, at Spanish Arch in Galway, Marina Market in Cork, Dún Laoghaire and the coast road from Howth to Malahide. It ran through what turned out to be the warmest summer ever recorded in Ireland.
2,300 samples handed out, and more than 2,000 people who left protected rather than just interested.
Around 2,400 conversations. Of those, at least 1,250 went past a hello and became a demonstration, someone standing there while a brand ambassador showed them how much sun cream a person actually needs. That is more than half of everyone who stopped. Three quarters of them were between 18 and 35, which is the group that protects itself least.
And what people said while they stood there. “I was looking for sun cream before leaving the house and I couldn’t find any, so this is great.” “I’ve heard the sun creams from Lidl are the best on the market.” And, from a German visitor, that it is really popular in their Lidls at home. The trust gap closing in real time, one conversation at a time.
Across the year, Lidl’s sun cream range doubled in sales. It is worth saying plainly that the summer of 2025 was the warmest ever recorded in Ireland, so the van was not the only thing selling sun cream that year. What the van did was make sure that when people finally reached for some, they had already had Cien in their hands.
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