Cancer is a disease that puts sufferers through immense emotional and physical trauma.

One of the most common side effects of treatment is hair loss.

Hair loss not only damages self-esteem but reduces one’s identity to that of “brave cancer sufferer”. It’s a huge issue, particularly for women. But it’s one that can be eased through access to wigs.

Pantene’s Beautiful Lengths is a global initiative to ensure that women get the wigs they need to help them feel like a person again. To date, almost 60,000 wigs have been created in Israel – but it’s not enough to meet demand.

Hair donation requires real commitment – donors need to grow at least eight inches of hair and avoid any chemical treatments such as hair dye. To make all that effort, donors need to understand how vital these wigs can be to sufferers.

Our insight was that while most teens and young women want to be famous, to be looked at and admired, those who have lost their hair want the opposite – they DON'T want to be noticed, they just wanted people to stop staring.

They just want to blend in.

We needed to communicate that desire directly to our donors, showing how we were helping more cancer patients.

Our creative idea was that this needed to be part of a normal everyday conversation, it needed to blend in and it needed to be private.

And to be inspiring, it needed to involve cancer sufferers themselves.

Despite our desire for a private conversation, we still needed to start a public conversation. We would create a real-life social experiment video that enabled everyone to understand first-hand what it’s like to walk down the street as a bald woman.

Secondly, to bring this home to our potential donors, we would create a direct link between patients and the public via WhatsApp, the group messaging service used by 80% of the population. This would enable real conversations to take place.

An army of cancer patients would talk to potential donors, telling them their own stories and stress the vital emotional benefits of having a wig.

To spread the message, each potential donor would be encouraged to recruit six friends to join a bespoke WhatsApp group. The eighth member would be a cancer patient. We would call this programme ‘7-4-1’ – alluding to the need for seven donors per wig.

To launch, we used hidden cameras to show what it felt like to walk down the street as a bald woman. Eye-tracking detectors showed how bald women are simply stared at but once our model put on a wig, the staring stopped.

Published on Israel’s leading content provider, Mako, the video ended with a Pantene phone number. People who wanted to donate were told to create a WhatsApp private chat group with six like-minded friends and Pantene added an 8th member – a cancer patient – through this number. This would be the recipient of the hair.

Our ‘7-4-1’ private chat channel became WhatsApp’s first-ever donation platform.

Finally, we created massive donation events in 200 malls, metro stations and parks across the country. We also recruited 500 hair salons across the country to offer a free hair cut to those who made a donation.

We set a new record in terms of hair donation. We recruited a remarkable 87,500 donors resulting in 12,500 new wigs – up 30% on 2017’s then record-breaking number and five times the amount from the initial campaign six years ago.

We received an overwhelming $700K+ of free coverage of the initiative across all media platforms, matching the paid investment in the campaign.

Our initiative was reported on all the major media outlets on and offline and even appeared on the evening news bulletin on Israel’s most-watched TV channel for the first-time ever.

Awareness of the initiative has increased fivefold year-on-year.