Helping bring them home - National Missing Persons Week 2020.
In 2019, National Missing Persons Week dedicated its name to specific missing people – becoming, for example, National Missing David Week… For 2020, the Federal Police wanted a new social media-focussed campaign that kept 2019’s naming approach and theme of “individuals, not statistics”.
How could we reimagine the same theme from a new angle to capture fresh media attention?
Answer? We flipped the perspective…
Client:
Australian Federal Police
Partner agency:
Three Scoops
Services:
Marketing campaign, Social Videos, Outdoor Advertising
Where 2019’s campaign focussed on photos of the missing, we focussed on the hole left behind. A suite of videos look into empty bedrooms, putting the audience in the shoes of family who’ve lost a loved one.
“I’ll see you later”, the casual farewell uttered around the world everyday, transforms to suggest the prison that life becomes for those left behind when those words become the final goodbye.
This approach was also a practical way to deal with a logistical problem. With the world in lockdown, we were unable to film anything (the project’s budget was too small to allow this anyway), and the client was unable to provide any material other than a low resolution image of each of the people who were the focus of the campaign.
Using stock photos of rooms gave us an alternative way to evoke the personalities of the missing, and put the viewer in the shoes of their family.
It can happen to anyone
The Federal Police also had a secondary messaging goal: to show that going missing is not a problem confined to just one economic, social or age group. So we created a complementary outdoor campaign that juxtaposed the single word that has become each person’s story – “missing” – with other more personal, relatable descriptions.
These ads were used on social media, as well as on outdoor billboards as the world started to emerge from lockdown.
This emphasised how missing people are like every one of us. At the same time, it also developed the meaning of the missing to those loved ones looking through the bedroom door in the main videos.
The results
The campaign connected with people at home and in the media. Extensive coverage across all platforms used the creative elements interviews with family members to amplify the campaign’s messages…