CU Celebrates 10th Anniversary... Searching for Missing Children through Subway Ads

CU's subway advertisement for finding missing children.

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeon Jinyoung] BGF Retail is conducting the ‘Your 10 Seconds, 10 Years for Missing Families! Campaign’ in collaboration with the Missing Children Search Association to commemorate the 10th anniversary of CU’s brand and the upcoming Missing Children’s Day on the 25th.

According to BGF Retail on the 23rd, this campaign aims to raise public awareness about long-term missing children by displaying advertisements containing information about long-term missing children at major subway stations, thereby drawing national attention.

This campaign was concretized by BGF Retail based on an idea proposed by Yonsei University’s Social Innovation Project Team ‘Padong,’ inspired by subway advertisements celebrating celebrities’ birthdays, which have recently become popular among MZ generation (Millennials + Generation Z) fans.

BGF Retail initially planned subway advertisements to celebrate CU’s 10th birthday, but to mark the 10th anniversary more meaningfully, all related budgets were donated to the Missing Children Search Association and replaced with campaign advertisements.

The sponsorship funds will be used to display advertisements of 13 long-term missing children on screen doors at 11 stations, including Seolleung Station, Express Bus Terminal Station, Sindorim Station, and City Hall Station.

Each of the 13 billboards contains personal information such as the missing child’s last photo, missing location, and physical characteristics, along with heartfelt messages from the missing children’s parents to their children, such as “Come back soon, my daughter, I’ll make you something delicious.”

Considering that the average daily number of users at the 11 stations displaying the long-term missing children advertisements exceeds 40,000, it is expected that about 13 million people will see these billboards during the one-month campaign period.

BGF Retail has been continuing various campaigns for six years to find missing children and prevent child disappearances.

In 2017, in cooperation with the National Police Agency, BGF Retail established ‘iCU,’ a social safety net system based on about 16,000 stores nationwide that safely protects missing children at stores and hands them over to the police or families, successfully reuniting over 110 children with their families.

Since 2018, in collaboration with the Child Rights Protection Agency, information about six long-term missing children is broadcast monthly on payment terminals (POS) at stores nationwide. In fact, in 2020, a missing child who had been lost for 20 years was reunited with their family thanks to the information broadcast on the POS terminals.

Park Jung-kwon, Head of Communications at BGF Retail, said, “This campaign signifies that by paying just 10 seconds of attention to long-term missing children advertisements, we can shorten the time for missing families to reunite. We will sincerely strive to create a world where children are happy, like good friends of our society.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.