Africa Cup of Nations 2025

The brief

AFCON is the biggest sporting property on the African calendar. The 2025 edition was hosted in Morocco, sanctioned by the Confederation of African Football (CAF) and headline-sponsored by TotalEnergies. The activation brief was sport-engagement-led: get fans interacting with the tournament between matches, build a database that the brand and sponsors could continue conversations with after the trophy was lifted, and do it on a channel that worked equally well for a fan in Casablanca, in Lagos, in Johannesburg and on a stadium concourse in Rabat.

WhatsApp was the obvious answer for the consumer side. The implementation was not obvious.

Why WhatsApp, specifically

Three reasons. First, WhatsApp is the dominant messenger across the African market — penetration is higher than email and higher than any single social platform. Second, it is free at the point of consumer entry, which removes the entry-cost objection that sinks SMS-led fan campaigns. Third, the conversation model maps perfectly to a tournament rhythm: fixture reminders, score notifications, predict-the-result mechanics, knockout-round excitement, all in a thread the fan checks anyway.

What we built

• Multi-language conversation flow. English, French and Arabic at minimum, with regional variants where the brand wanted to localise further. Branch logic in the flow handled language detection and fallback.
• Match-day mechanics. Predict-the-result entries, half-time polls, post-match opinion captures. Each one fed back into a draw pool.
• Prize mechanics across the tournament. Daily, weekly and tournament-grand-prize tiers, with the WhatsApp flow handling entry validation and winner notification end to end.
• Compliance plumbing. POPIA-aligned consent capture for South African entrants; equivalent local-data-protection logic for cross-border entrants. Audit-grade record keeping.
• Surge capacity. Knockout-stage match windows are spikier than anything else in mobile marketing. Volumes can move 50x in a five-minute window. The infrastructure was sized for the final, not the group stages.

What made it work

Tournament campaigns are won and lost on three things: the channel survives the surge, the language coverage actually matches the audience (not "we did the briefing in English so we will launch in English"), and the prize fulfilment is timed for the moment, not the morning after. We had spent two years building toward exactly this kind of activation. AFCON was the first time we got to use everything at once.

Want the longer write-up?

We can take you through the architecture, the volume numbers, the surge management and the lessons in a working session. Some details are under NDA with the brand and CAF. Most of the technical and strategic decisions are not.