We harnessed Facebook’s new facial recognition and auto tagging technology to search for missing persons. By creating Facebook profiles for missing persons and building them a friendship network, we created a social search party that scoured the backgrounds of millions of photos and videos posted on Facebook, daily.

If a missing person did appear in the background of a post and was recognized by Facebook's facial recognition, MPAN would be notified and an investigation could begin.

1/3 of the planet is on Facebook, spending an average of 20 minutes per day. Over 350,000,000 photos and videos are posted each day. The facial recognition update is searching for faces anyway, so we put it to good use, training it to look for some faces that the human eye couldn’t find. The use of Facebook for good, was perfectly timed as sentiment toward the data-hungry behemoth was at an all time low.

To harness Facebook’s facial recognition technology, we created profiles for missing people and populated them with personal information and tagged photos of each individual. Tagging each photo trained Facebook on what face to look for. A landing page www.invisiblefriends.com.au was established to explain how the tech and the initiative works, while also providing authenticity to the profiles, that were just one click away.

Then a large social and PR push aimed to garner as many Facebook friends as possible for each Invisible Friend profile.

The campaign launched in mid April and is ongoing, with missing persons organisations around the world wanting to implement the program to help bring home some of their missing people.

At the time of this submission, (only two weeks after launch) each Invisible Friends Facebook profile had more than triple the average amount of Facebook Friends and climbing. With a joined total of over 10,000 friends, this social search party is currently searching through tens of millions of photos and videos posted by friends and friends of friends, each day, around the clock.

The campaign reached more than 30 countries, and is being rolled out by other missing persons organisations in the USA, Britain, Europe and Asia.

On the first day of the PR launch, the overwhelmingly positive public and media response prompted Facebook's Communications department to reach out and give praise to MPAN and offer help. Negotiations between MPAN and Facebook are underway.

Over the past five years, Facebook has changed from an owned, to a predominantly paid channel for brands where advocacy and virality is almost impossible to achieve without paying for it.

'Invisible Friends' is an example of bucking that trend and redefining how charity organisations can use Facebook as an owned media channel - demonstrating its relevance for the media category.

'Invisible Friends' created a one-to-one relationship that enabled us to utilise Facebook’s facial recognition AI platform to scan millions of photos for evidence of missing persons in Australia and around the world.

We’re more connected than ever before, thanks to Facebook and social media; yet the way we search for missing persons hasn’t changed.

We rely on people to ‘look for’ or help ‘spot’ missing persons in public; which is why we've always defaulted to posters, milk-cartons and other low-cost, high-awareness media.

Our problem wasn’t with the media, but the requirement of people to ‘look’ for missing people - the reliance on others to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

In an ‘always on’ world, we’re bombarded with 1000s of messages daily, and the chances of achieving cut-through is diminishing. So we harnessed technology in a way that lets machines do the searching for us.

Using Facebook’s facial recognition - an AI engine that analyses every friend’s photo and video for your face - we made the process of search for missing persons as simple as adding a friend on Facebook.

Over 38,000 Australians go missing every year. The impact of these events are profound with recent research from Missing Persons Australia showing that for every one person that goes missing, 12 others are directly affected - well over 500,000 people each year.

After the first 48hrs, the chances of finding these missing persons diminishes significantly. Evidence and the public consciousness dries up and police are left with cold leads and nothing new to investigate. So they move on to other cases.

Our brief from Missing Persons Advocacy Network, who support those left behind and work to generate awareness of the people who are missing long-term, was to find a way to generate new information, clues and awareness in these cold cases. To do so, would provide hope and support to the families of the missing and raise awareness of each missing person’s circumstances around their disappearance.