“I’ll see you later” - National Missing Persons Week campaign (2020)

In 2019, National Missing Persons Week dedicated its name to specific missing people – becoming, for example, National Missing David Week… For 2020, the Federal Police wanted a new social media-focussed campaign that kept 2019’s naming approach and theme of “individuals, not statistics”.

How could we reimagine the same theme from a new angle to capture fresh media attention?

Answer? We flipped the perspective…

Where 2019’s campaign focussed on photos of the missing, we focussed on the hole left behind. A suite of videos look into empty bedrooms, putting the audience in the shoes of family who’ve lost a loved one.

“I’ll see you later”, the casual farewell uttered around the world everyday, transforms to suggest the prison that life becomes for those left behind when those words become the final goodbye.

It can happen to anyone

The Federal Police also had a secondary messaging goal: to show that going missing is not a problem confined to just one economic, social or age group. So we created an complementary outdoor campaign that juxtaposed the descriptor that has become each person’s story – “missing” – with other words that describe them.

This emphasised how missing people are like every one of us. At the same time, it also developed the meaning of the missing to those loved ones looking through the bedroom door in the main videos.

The results

The campaign connected with people at home and in the media. Extensive coverage across all platforms used the creative elements interviews with family members to amplify the campaign’s messages…