To keep hope alive, we literally brought the posters of six long-term missing children to life. Using a 3D mask technique, we brought natural movement to the pictures, from eye movements and blinking to larger movements and facial quirks. Turning these mostly ignored portraits into gripping confrontations on social media and digital billboards. Thanks to the autoplay function on Facebook and Twitter, these search messages first looked like a standard picture post of a missing childrens' poster, but after a few seconds they suddenly started moving.

We launched our campaign using different media.

We spread the moving posters on Twitter and Facebook, as videos that started playing automatically when people scrolled past it. Viewers were directed to a separate webpage for each missing child, where they could read more about the disappearances and also share the search messages. Instead of spreading normal paper posters, we used hundreds of digital billboards in major train stations in Belgium and subway stations in Brussels. Child Focus already used normal posters and social media to spread search messages. By adding movement to the usual pictures, people were really confronted and couldn’t ignore them no longer.

The campaign was a main news item on every national news channel and in every national newspaper, online and offline. The news even went abroad, and police departments and federations for missing children in other countries want to use the technique as well.

The Child Focus social pages got +4.000 followers, increasing the number of people that will share other search messages in the future.

2.008.197 views on social media

20.429 shares

6.402.414 social reach

€ 434.994 earned media

14.900.250 total reach (population of Belgium = 11.000.000)