Summary

Where you are says a lot about who you are — from the neighborhood you live in to your general interests. And that information starts to provide valuable insight into what you are likely to buy on your next shopping trip and where you are likely to make that trip.


In fact, it’s this type of customization – the marketing that adjusts to your location, and all of the nuances associated with it – that offers a more rich, interesting and relevant experience to you as a consumer, not to mention a more effective and efficient one for marketers.

Ultimately, it is closer to the ideal of connecting to the right person at the right time with the right message. It is this goal, and the data that supports it, that underpins much of what we do at Valassis to identify, engage, and convert consumers with media.

It’s this nuanced, customized approach that improves our results in helping the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) locate and recover missing children. We believe in this cause and have worked to leverage our technology and media resources to support it since 1985, through our Have You Seen Me?® program which features the names, photographs and descriptions of missing children across our products.

But, we are always looking to go a step further and make the message even more relevant.

A few years ago, internal analysis revealed that most of the children we have featured were found very close to where they went missing — most were in the same state, many in the same city. So, as we have done since we first introduced the program, we made an improvement and began distributing information about a child in the geographic area where he or she went missing.

Fortunately, our technology is built to execute against this sort of localized distribution — via both print and online. So, it was a matter of applying the same targeting capabilities we use to give relevant marketing messages to consumers.

This enabled us to create a more localized version of Have Your Seen Me?, which featured 50 children in 50 states, focusing our efforts on areas where each child was most likely to be found. The result was not only more awareness of missing children in the areas they were more likely to be found and recovered, we were able to feature even more missing children across the country.

Our team continues to evaluate new ways of applying our technology to making sure that no missing child is ever forgotten. As we innovate more effective and efficient ways for brands to engage and convert consumers, we look forward to a win-win — more effective brand engagement and improved awareness and recovery of missing children.

For more information on the Have You Seen Me? program, visit https://vericast.com/corporate-responsibility/. For more information on National Missing Children’s Day, visit https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/events/national-missing-childrens-day.