In 2020, South Korea had 660 children who had been missing for more than a year; 638 of them had been missing for more than five years. Their families say that the hardest thing is not the absence, but being forgotten: posters fade, leads grow cold, and over time, even hope begins to seem naive.
Then, the agency Cheil Worldwide, together with the Korean National Police, thought of something no one had noticed: the tape used to seal packages. They designed a printed version with photos of children who had been missing for years and a police sketch of what they would look like today. They called it Hope Tape and launched it on May 25, 2020, International Missing Children’s Day.
Korea Post and Hanjin distributed it throughout the country. In just one month, more than 620,000 packages reached Korean households carrying those faces on every corner of the box. Cheil Worldwide went further: it released the design rights so that any company or organization in the world could replicate the idea at no cost. Sometimes, the solution was not in new technology, but in looking at what was already in one’s hands.