SITUATION

According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Security (FBSP), over 135 children and adolescents go missing every day in crowded places. And although the numbers keep growing faster, the established method for searching for lost children remains painfully slow. That’s a red alert, since the first minutes/hours are the most critical in determining the chances of finding them.

BRIEF

How could Eletromidia, the biggest Out Of Home media company in Brazil, help increase the chances of finding missing children that disappear in public spaces?

OBJECTIVES

Use the power of the Eletromidia network to create a service that cuts down on the average time to find a child, reinforces our most valuable assets (speed, tech, geolocation, innovation) and generates value for our brand, our service, our advertisers, and society as whole.

We transformed our digital OOH displays into a tool for tracking down missing children at the exact moment they disappear. A tool that’s fast and accurate. An activation that immediately mobilized the crowd in the immediate vicinity where a child went missing to help the parents find them.

1. Data is generated by local authorities with our app, containing the location of the incident and information about the child. This data is sent in real time to Eletromidia.

2. Integrated OOH in the immediate vicinity instantly stops displaying advertisements and starts to display posters containing the children's name, age and photo. The poster also contains a phone number for people to call if they see the child.

3. The radius of the search increases every 10 minutes.

The strategy was to create a tool that could use data on missing children, provided by parents, at the exact moment they disappeared, and present that information in real time directly to people who were in the vicinity and could join in the search.

When a child is lost in shopping malls, parents usually seek out security guards. So, we trained these professionals with our protocol and equipped them with our app.

Then, when a Lost Child Alert was triggered, all paid advertisements stopped and we started to display a poster of the missing child on every Eletromidia screen in the region.

All the Alerts had a clear call to action: if you see this child, call the number below. When calling, people spoke to a trained professional who instructed them and was in direct contact with the security guard and the parents of the missing child.

Lost Child Alert was initially rolled out in a mall in the city of São Paulo (Shopping Cidade São Paulo) in April 2024. During the first month, Eletromidia was able to fine-tune its protocols and adjust a few last details to create a faster and more agile tool to help parents in an emergency.

Eletromidia is now extending the service to other malls and studying how to expand the project to other places with large crowds where children often disappear, like subway stations, beaches and airports.

In the first month of implementation, Lost Child Alerts were displayed on more than 5,000 digital OOH screens, transforming more than US$1 million of advertiser-paid media into posters advertising lost children.

Within the first month, Lost Child Alert had more than 11.5 million media impressions, and up to 1 million people were mobilized in the search for lost children through 5,000 OOH digital screens.The initiative turned US$1 million in paid media into a free search tool for parents and put Eletromidia on the map not only as the largest OOH media company in Brazil, but as a media company that goes beyond media and uses its expertise to generate true value to society through the transformation of urban spaces. Besides that, the innovation also reinforced Eletromidia's strongest assets: its speed, range, technology and geolocation.