AS Roma have partnered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States and Telefono Azzurro in Italy to use the club’s social media channels to raise awareness about the plight of missing children this summer.
Roma have carved a reputation as digital leaders when it comes to the club’s innovative use of social media, in particular the award-winning transfer announcements released over the past two summers.
Having helped kick-start the trend for funny and weird social media player signing announcements in 2017, Roma killed off that video style in 2018 in favour of deliberately lo-fi efforts, including intentionally bad photoshop – helping the transfer unveilings once again go viral on Twitter.Paul Rogers, Head of Strategy at AS Roma explained: “Taking inspiration from the use of milk cartons to display a photo of a missing child in America, the band’s video director Tony Kaye decided to use the medium of a pop video played on MTV and music channels globally to try and help find 36 missing children. In the end, I think they helped locate 21 children. There were four versions of the video made, two for the United States and one each for the UK and Australia.
“With Roma, we thought, we could try and do something similar but updated for the social media generation, which didn’t exist when Soul Asylum released their video. We want to use the viral nature of social media transfer announcements to help raise awareness for missing children. We have a massive social media following and our announcements generate incredible reach and awareness, all over the world, so we thought that at the exact moment when the world’s attention is on the club’s announcement, we could use our social media channels not for self-promotion but rather to help both the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Telefono Azzurro find missing children.”
John Clark, CEO and President of NCMEC said: “It’s an incredible initiative and a very innovative way to help tackle a universal issue. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children assists with more than 25,000 missing children cases in the United States every year. If this initiative – using the power of social media – can raise awareness about not just the missing children featured, but also the work we do year-round, in terms of raising awareness and preventative measures, then it will have been a success.
“NCMEC sees first-hand the importance of not losing hope when it comes to finding a missing child. We know that children come home after days, years, and decades of being missing. We depend on organisations like AS Roma to spread awareness and use their voice for change. We could not be prouder of AS Roma for spreading awareness on a global scale.”
Ernesto Caffo, President of Telefono Azzuro, added: “We are thankful to AS Roma for creating this opportunity to shine a light on the serious issue of missing children, a cause that too often receives little coverage in mainstream media. This important initiative is an opportunity to raise public awareness of an issue that affects so many families throughout the world, and also for different countries to come together and attempt to find common solutions to the issue, across borders.
“The international community needs to push towards a target of wider collaboration on this issue, something we have been working on in Italy with co-operation between national institutions, law enforcement agencies and the legal system.”
