Insight
In China, over 200,000 children disappear every year. While many parents undertake their own efforts to look for their children, only 0.1% can be found. The most critical issue is that information about the missing children is not widely accessible to the general public.
Strategy
China has approximately 600 million mobile phone users and no matter where they are, people have the habit of searching for free WiFi connections.
Baobeihuijia, a search help organisation, wanted to use the mobile platform to rapidly extend the influence. The idea was that when people searched for free WiFi, they would help search for missing children.
Execution
Equipped with a special satellite, the brand and agency TBWA\Being developed its own proprietary WiFi hotspots system to provide connections.
When people turned on their WLAN to search for free WiFi, they were presented with WiFi hotspots named after SOS messages from missing children.
Once they clicked on a hotspot, a page would pop up with images and information about that particular missing child. From that, they could instantly share it on social media. Only once they had shared the information, could a user then access the free WiFi. Different WiFi names with different information were shown to people on a random basis.
Check out the campaign video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R19h397JObI.
Results
Nearly 400 million people connected to the free WiFi to help look for missing children. Their information was then shared an additional 37.5 million times.
The project was talked about across TV, newspapers, radio, blogs and social media, resulting in more than 230 pieces of local and foreign media coverage, all of which helped many parents find and reunite with their missing children.