The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2025–2026
Daangn alerts only neighbors near a missing person, turning its app into a search party
Korea's Daangn paired police missing-person data with its hyper-local network, alerting only users within 1.5–3 km — 1,233 cases were resolved by November 2025.
Daangn
What it had to solve
About 70,000 people go missing in South Korea every year, and the first 48 hours decide most outcomes. Police missing-person text alerts went out to entire cities and provinces, so alert fatigue and falling tip rates weakened the one mechanism that works: neighbors reporting sightings.
How it works
South Korea records about 70,000 missing-person cases a year, and the first 48 hours are critical. Police already sent missing-person alerts by text, but they reached broad city and province areas, producing alert fatigue and fewer useful tips from the neighbors who might actually spot someone.
Daangn, Korea's hyper-local community app, had the opposite structure: it shares town-level information within an average radius of about 1.5 km, and neighbors routinely use it to find lost pets and people. With agency Innocean and the National Police Agency, it built Comeback Home, a system that pulls Safe Dream police data every ten minutes and shows each case only to users within the 1.5–3 km radius where the missing person is most likely to be found.
The alerts appear on the town map and a dedicated missing-neighbor board, with comments, reactions and a report button that connects straight to police. In its first months the campaign posted 1,236 notices that drew 410,000 views and helped close 1,233 cases, lifted traffic on the app's incidents tab tenfold, and won the 2025 Korea Advertising Awards Grand Prix and a Spikes Asia 2026 Media Bronze.
Why it lands
- Hyper-local delivery matched the physics of the problem: a missing person is found by whoever is physically nearby, not by whoever is broadly notified.
- Replacing a one-way national SMS with a two-way community thread gave neighbors a way to report sightings instead of just reading them.
- The idea belonged to Daangn's own structure, so no other platform could copy it without the same neighborhood-level reach.
- Making the safety role visible strengthened Daangn's rebrand from marketplace to local-life platform.
What it did
Between September and November 2025 Daangn posted 1,236 missing-person notices that drew 410,000 views, and 1,233 cases were closed including by police. Traffic on the app's incidents tab grew tenfold, and the work won the Grand Prix at the 2025 Korea Advertising Awards plus a Bronze Spike in Media at Spikes Asia 2026.
What you can take
When an appeal only works through eyewitnesses, broadcast reach beats precision: showing an alert only to the people closest to the event turns passive receivers into active responders.
Since then
Comeback Home continued as a permanent feature rather than a one-off campaign, with police data flowing into the app on an ongoing basis. The work was named Grand Prix winner at the 2025 Korea Advertising Awards and took a Bronze Spike in Media at Spikes Asia 2026, and Daangn and Innocean framed it as proof that a local community platform can build a social safety net no central alert system can match.
Sources
- [K-AD] Innocean, Daangn and the National Police Agency launch the Comeback Home campaign
- 2025 Korea Advertising Awards Grand Prix — Daangn's neighbor-participation missing-person search
- Dminusone wins three Spikes including Gold; Innocean's Comeback Home takes Media Bronze
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card