In the UK, someone goes missing every 90 seconds. But people no longer take notice of ‘Missing’ posters, because they see so many of them, so frequently. At the same time, the design of ‘Missing’ posters has never fundamentally changed. That’s despite our understanding of human behaviour and the technology at our disposal coming on leaps and bounds in recent years. Our brief was to redesign ‘Missing’ posters to get people to take notice of them and in doing so make them more effective. We only had our hero media sites for one day, so we had to make as big a splash as possible in that time.

The project earned 300+ articles when launched and reached a wide range of press and media coverage both nationally and internationally. This Included prime-time reports by ITV and the BBC, including interviews with the family of Leah Croucher, one of the featured missing children. It also received featured coverage on CBS in the U.S. and was widely discussed on social media, mostly on Twitter where the majority of people perceived it as a positive innovation. Research by Ocean Outdoors said that overall, the project created over £1 Billion in earned media.

These far more effective posters are in the process of being rolled out by the charity across all sites as standard procedure and police forces have requested to adopt the system for their posters. The campaign further helped the brand to be to be perceived as one of the most innovative, hard-working and culturally relevant charities in the UK.

We used behavioural scientists to inform the design from the offset. So the efficacy of each of our design choices were evidence based.

Clearer, higher resolution images are easier to identify and remember, yet the photos provided by the police are often poor quality. We worked with machine learning and AI experts to enhance the resolution of the photos. Then, since moving faces are more memorable than still ones, they then helped us animated them – getting them to blink, smile and look around. Both the use of machine learning and AI had never been used in this way in advertising before.

A QR code was used to simplify the messaging and create a sharable campaign page. By housing key information online, the messaging could be minimised to maximise engagement.

A back-end system enables the charity to create and alter the posters without a designer.

The posters ran for one day on International Missing Children’s Day. (25th May 2022)