Last year – see below – No Friction’s Michael Frick partnered with Muhtayzik Hoffer and NCMEC to develop a music strategy and tech driven platform that helped recover 20 missing children and a 60% increase in leads with #RunawayTrain25. 

1 year later, in honor of National Missing Children’s Day, the team has launched a new feature to the site. You can now create a video for a missing child you know:

Michael Frick and the team at NO FRICTION teamed up with SF agency M/H VCCP and the National Center for Missing + Exploited Children (NCMEC) to create a new music video version of Soul Asylum’s Runaway Train to help find missing children. To date, 20 kids have returned home since the campaign began airing in late May.

Here’s the Runaway Train video + a case study of the project:

The original music video for Soul Asylum’s ‘90s hit “Runaway Train” doubled as a call-to-action, featuring missing children around the world and urging viewers to help find them. Of the 36 children featured, 21 were eventually found.

To commemorate the music video’s 25th anniversary, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) released a new version that uses geo-targeting technology to automatically populate the video with profiles of local missing children based on the viewer’s location.

The campaign team also partnered with Twitter and was able to leverage the @TwitterMusic and @TwitterForGood accounts to drive more traffic toward tweets about #RunawayTrain25. The artists Jamie N Commons, Skylar Grey and Gallant used their Twitter platforms to promote songs to fans during the initial launch, which were then supported through the Twitter accounts.

The campaign has already helped locate a runaway 16-year-old girl from Minneapolis, Minnesota. After watching the music video, one of the girl’s friends identified her and reached out, successfully encouraging her to return home.

Social media leads and tips for NCMEC have increased by 65% since the campaign’s launch. Following its debut on Good Morning America, the music video was covered by a number of national outlets, including Billboard, Entertainment Tonight, Rolling Stone, MTV and CNN, as well as marketing trade publications and the Wall Street Journal’s CMO Today newsletter. Online coverage exceeded 100 articles, including write-ups on the websites of 48 local newspapers and radio stations.

The campaign website has been visited more than 100K times, including 17,500 visits on the day of its launch. The music video itself has been viewed more than 8 million times across digital and social platforms and was recently nominated in the Video for Good category at the MTV Video Music Awards.

At No Friction, we understand that the human relationship with music is powerful and visceral. We partner with forward thinking clients to design and produce music & culture driven content that succeeds in digital culture and invites action. Whether developing a 360 degree solution for a brand campaign, outlining a sonic branding strategy, coordinating the fine details of entertainment partnership, procuring an original score, music supervision or simply securing music rights for any platform – we’ve got a solution.