INVISIBLE FRIENDS

Bronze Spike

Case Film

Presentation Image

TitleINVISIBLE FRIENDS
BrandMISSING PERSONS ADVOCACY NETWORK
Product / ServiceMISSING PERSONS ADVOCACY NETWORK
CategoryB03. Social for Mobile
EntrantwhiteGREY MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Idea Creation whiteGREY MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Production whiteGREY MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

Credits

Name Company Position
Chad Mackenzie whiteGREY National Executive Creative Director
Anthony Moss whiteGREY Executive Creative Director
Ronojoy Ghosh whiteGREY Creative Director
Nic Molyneux whiteGREY Copywriter
Benjamin Mann whiteGREY Art Director
Lauren Bowen whiteGREY Digital Designer
Claudia McInerney whiteGREY Managing Director
Amy Ross whiteGREY Account Director
Holly Ryan whiteGREY Account Manager
Harriet Lade whiteGREY Account Manager
Matt Simms whiteGREY Senior Experience Strategist
Mathieu Mence whiteGREY Developer
Yohan Mocho whiteGREY Developer
Leigh Cooke whiteGREY Editor

The Campaign

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

Creative Execution

To harness Facebook’s facial recognition technology, we created 10 profiles for 10 missing people and populated them with personal information and photos of each individual. Tagging each photo trained Facebook on what face to look for. A landing page invisiblefriends.com.au was established to explain how the tech and the initiative work, while also providing authenticity to the profiles. 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 for some of their missing people.

At the time of this submission, (only two weeks from 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, searching through tens of millions of photos and videos posted by friends and friends of friends, each day. The campaign reached more than 25 countries, and is being rolled out by other missing persons organisations in the USA, Britain, Europe and Asia. And on the first day of the PR launch, based on the overwhelmingly positive public and media response, Facebook reached out to praise MPAN and offer help. Negotiations are underway.

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 have 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. We found a way to utilise technology to let 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 the process of search for ‘missing persons’ as simple as adding a friend on Facebook.

Links

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