The digital world is increasingly compartmentalized due to government controlled firewalls, national legal limitations, and self censorship by social media companies. While this environment may seem disadvantageous, programmatic advertising is considered quite the contrary. One such example is Anthalon, a promising new company which is providing global access to programmatic advertising methods to governments and NGO's. Due to the nature of their work and the varied customers in the governmental end NGO spaces, Anthalon rarely shares details of its campaigns with the wider public. Despite this it recently came to light that their services are proving invaluable finding missing persons and specifically missing children back in a timely manner.
While AMBER alerts have become parts of the common vocabulary, and are widely used in finding missing people and children, these systems do have their limitations. Usually they are deployed as quickly as possible after a person or child has gone missing, often with great success. After this initial action, the capabilities of the authorities decline when it comes to spreading information. It may not be possible to locate the missing person precisely enough, there may be privacy laws that have to be taken into account , or the missing person or child has moved to a country or territory outside of the jurisdiction of the researching authority. This is where Anthalon is doing a lot of work to great satisfaction of its customers.
Anthalon offers the ability to get a message of missing children out within 2 hours of receiving it, and publishing it to phones and other internet-connected devices anywhere in the world. But also; more importantly, highly local (location targeting). This level of precision can be as narrow as 100 meters. This message can contain for example a so called 'click-to-whatsapp' functionality; meaning that if somebody clicks, he/she is immediately forwarded to their WhatsApp interface and is able to send a message to a pre-configurated mobile number. This greatly enhances the ability of authorities to track missing and abducted people down in places otherwise out of reach. It is tragically common for abductors to take their abductees cross borders to evade justice. Abroad they can lead comfortable lives, for instance countries that are corrupt or have fewer resources to assist foreign entities in researching these cases. Anthalon can direct media and digital missing person messages/content to these precise or general locations and retrieve vital information at extremely low costs compared to other commonly used investigative tactics. In addition to targeting by geographical location, Anthalon is capable of using a number of additional targeting methods to reach even more specific audiences such as certain ethnic groups within a country's population. Although the company does not divulge information on the precise nature of its successes due to privacy concerns, it is expecting to increase its activities in this area substantially in the coming years.
