For this campaign, the missing children were the data which included their names, photos, ages, where they were from, and how long they’d been missing. This data was at the heart of everything we did.

The children’s data was pulled from the FBI / The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children database and was combined with the location data of the viewer/media placement. These missing children were then dynamically served directly into a music video, dynamic OOH, and dynamic banners in real-time. Viewers saw media relevant to them, and the children missing from their area.

Missing kids: a national problem that can only be solved locally.

The FBI says there are over 400,000 reports of missing children in the US annually. The majority of those cases are solved very quickly, but 30,000 a year are in very high danger. These are kids who may have been groomed and lured away by sex traffickers, with 1 in 6 missing kids likely trafficked. Others could be abducted or in a downward spiral of homelessness and/or drug addiction.

The most effective means of recovering them is to get their faces in front of the local audience where they went missing, with 61% of recoveries happening in the same state.

With cases commonplace, there is not necessary news coverage.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children needed to get locally relevant faces in front of local audiences, but on a national scale.

Insight: Make something so engaging that it would get national attention, but be locally relevant.

Idea: Remake Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” as a location-aware music video that pulls missing children from the FBI / NCMEC database and dynamically serves them in hyper-localized versions.

25 years ago the band Soul Asylum created the hit single, “Runaway Train.” They worked with NCMEC and director Tony Kaye to create a video that showed real missing children.

For the 25th anniversary, we remade the video with a modern track, and modern technology.

With 61% of recoveries happening in the same state the kids went missing from, we used geo-tech to serve a different version of the video in every area of the country, showing photos of kids missing from the viewer’s area.

We got more faces of missing children on dynamic, local OOH placements, dynamic banners, and gas station TV.

The strategy of “National attention, local relevance” made the target audience the local community where the children went missing. Most kids are found in the same state. So the challenge was to make something big enough and attractive enough to garner national media attention, while having deep local relevance showing locally missing kids.

This nationally covered video gave local news stations across the country a local version for them to cover, bringing locally missing kids the coverage they needed.

Furthermore, we secured the largest ever donation of digital, dynamic OOH space, which we also used to get faces of missing children where they’re most likely to be found… gas stations, malls, and roadsides.

A response mechanism was present in all communications for viewers to provide tips to NCMEC. The music video even enabled it right in the film interface on both mobile and desktop.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children shares a national database of missing children cases with the FBI. This includes their photos, names, original location, details about where they were last seen, and even age-progressed composite photos.

When viewers of the video watch at RunawayTrain25.com, we are pulling the IP location of the viewer and dynamically creating a version of the film that includes children missing from that area. Tens of thousands of versions of the film were generated, with new ones every day so that the missing children featured in the film are always current.

Furthermore, we supported the campaign with dynamic banners and dynamic, localized OOH, putting kids’ faces where they’re most likely to be seen: online in malls, gas stations, and roadsides. With media donated by the Outdoor Association of America, it was the largest of its kind in American history.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children directly credits the campaign with reuniting 61 children with their families. But perhaps even more importantly, many more recoveries are happening due to the increased tips and press coverage bringing the issue to the forefront of attention.

On launch day, site traffic to the NCMEC tip page exploded to 7000 visits per minute. Post launch, actual tips have sustained and even increased to 60% higher than pre-launch.

The missing children received the desperately needed press coverage on three critical fronts: National, local, and entertainment, securing a place in popular culture. With coverage in 39 separate states, it has received over 2 billion press impressions.