Awareness of the operation is low, because most people fear it’s a long and difficult procedure. They don’t understand that it’s relatively simple and takes as little as 45 minutes to perform.

The one thing that also takes 45 mins, is each half of South Africa’s favourite sport, Soccer.

And just about everyone understands the game.

So to demonstrate that it takes as little as half a game of soccer to change a life,

we operated on 2 boys, Alex and Ofentse, live during each half of Africa’s most televised soccer match. The Soweto Derby.

To hijack Africa’s biggest soccer event, meant that we had to onboard various media partners, sponsors and soccer pundits for the activation to be a success. We negotiated a bespoke media deal with the broadcaster to use the platform – and bought pregame, halftime and post-game ad space, to drive viewers to our Twitter feed.

One month before the game, we released the first episode of a 3-part web series, to introduce Alex and Ofentse. The film shed light on living with a cleft lip. The film added momentum behind #operation45 and had a direct call-to-action, follow @operationsmile.

We created operation45.com to house all the film content and information about donations and volunteering for Operation Smile.

We brought in adidas as a partner. Together, we designed Operation45 x Adidas merchandise and collateral, which was sent to 62 influencers who created buzz for the campaign.

Over 22 million people engaged with the campaign – that’s almost half the population of South Africa, which resulted in a 400% increase in child registrations and tripled the amount of volunteers within 2 months.