Missing Captcha
Mães da Sé
Issue 38 | March 2016
Agency
Leo Burnett Tailor Made
Creative Team
Co-President and Chief Creative Officer Marcelo Reis Creative Directors Marcio Juniot Pedro Utzeri Marcelo Bruzzesi Creatives Vitor Menezes Pedro Furtado Fred Corazza
Production Team
Agency Producers Celso Groba Maria Fernanda Moura Dudi Ciampolini Bourroul Motion Designer Christian Balzano Digital Production Company Iwwa Digital Sound Production Company Casa da Árvore Sound Producers Pedro Penna Fernando Ianni
Other Credits
Account Team Denise Millan Junior Bottura Rafael Oliveira Marcelo Martirani Julia Cardoso Media Team Fernando Sales André Massuda Leonardo Moraes Leandro Fujita Planning Ana Luiza Santos Jad Fayad
Date
December 2015
Background
A captcha was a security system that helped protect websites from automatic bots. Everyday, millions of captchas were filled worldwide. But what if this technology could help find missing persons?
Idea
To do so, the random words in the captcha were substituted for the names of missing people and the dates when they went missing. This way, whenever someone typed in a captcha, they also helped find a missing person. The project was open source so that any company could install it on their website for free, making it safer and, at the same time, helping a good cause.
Results
The results so far; 31,640 people directly impacted; 18 company websites have adopted the technology so far.
Our Thoughts
This is exactly the sort of innovative idea we like to showcase in Directory. But what exactly is innovation? This is a question that becomes increasingly difficult to answer at a time when so many marketers are trying to do a world-first or a never-done-before campaign that will attract millions of column inches of PR. For me, an innovation does not have to be an invention. It can be an idea which adapts or modifies an existing arrangement in order to change it and make it better.
That's what this does. It doesn't reinvent online security. It takes an existing system and makes it better by making it useful in a way its original designers could never have imagined. Now all it needs is thousands more than just 18 websites using it across Brazil.