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 longterm,

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.

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.