CHILD FOCUS | Coins of Hope | 2017
They erased the king's face / CHILD FOCUS "Coins of Hope"
The king's face stamped on a coin was replaced with the face of a missing child, and the coin was put into real circulation. Nobody noticed as they spent it—until that one coin waited for the moment someone's eyes would finally land on it.
The problem
Searching for missing children usually depends on posters with photos or a brief flash on the news, and that information quickly gets buried. What was needed was a way to put information into more people's hands, for longer.
The insight
There's something nearby that passes through millions of hands every day: coins. Nobody really studies the face on them closely, but they stay put in your wallet anyway. That quality of being ignored yet impossible to get rid of was exactly what could be used.
The idea
The king's portrait stamped on the coin was replaced with the face of a real missing child. With government approval, it was issued as official currency, and similar schemes were rolled out not just in Belgium but in several other countries too. At shops, vending machines, donation boxes—in every kind of payment across the city—that face kept passing from hand to hand.
What happened
The campaign won Gold at Cannes Lions. As an initiative using coins—a medium everyone touches every day—it spread in an unusual way even within the industry.
Afterthought
This feels less like advertising and more like hijacking the infrastructure of society itself. That one coin in your wallet might just be the thread that leads to someone's memory. Next time you get change, I think I'll actually look at the face on it.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2017
