The original “Runaway Train” song by Soul Asylum was a massive hit that is part of any American's psyche. The original video was played endlessly on MTV.

For the 25th anniversary of the song, we reimagined the track with emerging artists, Jamie N Commons, Skylar Grey, and Gallant. We created a totally new kind of music video that dynamically pulls actual missing kids from the FBI / NCMEC database and serves them directly into hyper-localized versions of the video.

It was featured in Variety, Billboard, Entertainment Tonight, Rolling Stone, People and nominated for an MTV Video Music Award.

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.

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

The idea: Remake Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” as a location-aware music video that pulls missing children from the FBI / National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (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. It aired nationally on MTV and helped recover some of the kids.

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

National Missing Children’s day was May 25th. We went live with RunawayTrain25.com on May 22, in order to gain more news coverage.

To get the kids faces in front of as many people as possible, we had been in conversations with three tiers of media outlets in advance of the launch: national lifestyle news, local news channels, and entertainment news. All three verticals provided enormous coverage, resulting in 2 billion media impressions.

National lifestyle News: Good Morning America, People Magazine, CNN, Today, etc.

Local channels: 39 states

Entertainment/Music: Rolling Stone, Billboard, MTV, Entertainment Tonight, etc.

350 dynamic OOH placements across the country showed current, local, photos and details of missing kids from the FBI / NCMEC database.

Individual gas station tv videos across 48 states, each showed 3 children.

A Delta Airlines partnership gave placements in in-flight magazines to help passengers spot the signs of human trafficking.

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 7,000 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 2 billion press impressions, much of which was centered around specific missing children cases in different locations.