The archive · Public & Social · Marketing decision · 2024–2025
Child Focus renames missing girl after Nafi Thiam — celebrity searches find her alive
Child Focus renames missing Juliette after Belgium's most-searched woman; every 'Nafi Thiam' query surfaces her poster — 2M+ searches, found alive.
Child Focus
What it had to solve
A year and a half after Juliette Goormans went missing, the search had faded from public view. Online attention meanwhile gravitated to celebrities — above all Nafi Thiam, Belgium's three-time Olympic champion and most-searched woman — so the brief was to put Juliette back in front of millions without a news hook.
How it works
A year and a half after Juliette Goormans disappeared, the search for her had faded from public view. Her case no longer had a news hook, while online attention was concentrated on a handful of Belgian celebrities — above all Nafi Thiam, the three-time Olympic champion and the most searched Belgian woman on the internet.
Child Focus's idea was to move Juliette into that existing stream of attention. The organization changed her name into Nafi Thiam and ran a search campaign under that name: anyone who searched Google or YouTube for 'Nafi Thiam' now saw an ad with Juliette's missing poster as the top result.
The mechanics turned every celebrity query into a reminder that a child was still missing. Within weeks the campaign had drawn more than two million searches, and Juliette became the most searched Belgian in the world.
Three weeks into the campaign, a new lead came in. Following it up, Child Focus found Juliette alive and well — the campaign's declared goal achieved.
Why it lands
- It attaches the cause to attention that already exists instead of fighting for fresh attention.
- The rename makes every later search for Nafi Thiam keep surfacing the poster, so the message self-perpetuates.
- Search is a measurable channel: the campaign's reach was counted in actual queries, not claimed impressions.
- It ends in a concrete, verifiable outcome — a new lead and a live recovery.
What it did
The campaign drew more than two million searches, making Juliette the most searched Belgian in the world. Three weeks in, a new lead arrived and Juliette was found alive and well.
What you can take
When attention is the bottleneck, don't ask people to care more — plug the cause into the attention that already exists: one rename turned a celebrity's search traffic into a missing-person alert.
Since then
Three weeks after launch, a new lead from the campaign was investigated and Juliette was found alive and well, closing the case. The work then entered the D&AD awards archive as an example of media-led problem solving, and its mechanism — renaming the missing person to ride celebrity search demand — remains the reason the case is studied: two million intentional searches for a missing girl's poster.
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