Eletromidia is the largest OOH media company in Brazil, with over 70,000 digital and static displays in major cities. But it's way more than that: it's a media company that wants to go beyond and transform public spaces and the problems related to them.

Eletromidia had already innovated with a previous project, the Guarded Bus Stop, transforming digital bus stop billboards into a tool to keep women company by connecting them in real time with a security professional. A OOH solution for a market in which 77% of women don’t feel safe waiting alone for a bus at night. The project was a hit, both with advertisers and society.

This year, Eletromidia tackled a different problem: according to the Brazilian Forum of Public Security (FBSP), over 135 children and adolescents go missing every day. That's 48.600 minors a year. 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. Since most disappearances happen in crowded public spaces like shopping malls, airports, metro stations and other places which happen to have plenty of Eletromidia digital displays, we decided to take action. A public security problem that goes beyond the responsibilities of a private media company, but which speaks to Eletromidia's greatest ambition: to transform cities and consumers’ lives through our technology and range.

SITUATION

According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Security (FBSP), over 135 children and adolescents go missing every day in crowded spaces like shopping malls, airports, and beaches. The exact same places that Eletromidia, the largest OOH media company in Brazil, has a robust presence.

THE CHALLENGE THE BUSINESS WAS FACING

Although finding missing children is not our responsibility, transforming society and improving public spaces is part of our purpose. And we knew we could help.

OBJECTIVES

Use the power of the Eletromidia network to create a service that reduces the average time it takes to find a child, reinforce our most valuable assets (speed, tech, geolocation, innovation) and generate value for our brand, our service, our advertisers, and society as whole.

According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Security (FBSP), over 135 children and adolescents go missing every day, that's 48.600 minors a year. 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.

Most of those disappearances happen in crowded public spaces like shopping malls, airports, metro stations and other places that happen to have plenty of digital displays from Eletromidia.

Our strategy was to utilize our digital OOH network, the largest in Brazil, to assist in locating missing children at the exact moment of their disappearance.

So we partnered with advertisers to create 'Lost Child Alert,' a service that utilizes data generated by local authorities when parents request assistance on the site of the incident.

When triggered, it transforms our OOH network in a 2-km radius in the immediate area the child was last seen into a real-time search tool. OOHs instantly stop displaying advertising, and the search for the lost child starts. The radius expands by2 km every 10 minutes.

We integrated our mobile app with Eletromidia’s OOH media network, and trained security guards at the mall Shopping Cidade São Paulo to use it. We developed tests to make sure the alert started on OOH displays inside the mall, and expanded their reach every ten minutes, ensuring broad coverage. We made sure displays could trigger alerts instantly, with one click, immediately after parents provided the information. And we designed a label to recognize companies participating in the initiative.

We were able to turn digital displays into a tool for searching for missing children at the exact moment they disappeared. A tool that replaces ads with alerts with speed and accuracy, reinventing the purpose of a media channel and transforming paid media displays into a free search tool for society.

We piloted the initiative at Shopping Cidade São Paulo, and within a month over U$1MM in paid media transformed into a free search tool for parents. We also are in contact with other malls that want to implement the initiative and are studying a potential expansion to train stations, airports, beaches and other crowded spaces where kids often disappear.

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.