Uber Find Missing Russian Children

Next time you're trying to prove to somebody that your job isn't all making racially problematic Pepsi ads or selling cigarettes to children or whatever it is they think you do in advertising, here's a great story about the power of advertising; a campaign in Russia between Proximity and Uber found a missing child and brought them home.

For UberSearch, the agency (part of the BBDO Russia Group,) took advantage of the Russian habit of decorating cars with airbrush paintings and images. Instead of the usual gaudy images of wild animals and family members, they put portraits of missing children on Uber cars.

Working with the knowledge that 70% of successes in finding children come from the finding of witnesses, the agency worked with the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and Missing Children Organization and took portraits of three children - Yana, Katya, and Danila - off of often ignored, low reach posters and sent them across the city of Uber cabs.

With this action, alongside notifications on the app itself, they caught the attention of the Russian media, who publicised the campaign, thereby bringing these three children to the nation's attention. This led to Yana being found and brought back to safety, with the search for the other two kids continuing.

The result was not only huge publicity for a company in desperate need of some good news, but the actual return of a missing child.