Have You Seen Me?

My company is really an awesome place to work…at least for me. I don’t have any complaints. Well, sometimes I do but overall, I’m blessed to work here. After 5 years, there has been a lot of change but this company has kept me through the good and bad. Even when they probably should have fired me, they haven’t. They have forgiven the mistakes I’ve made and rewarded me plenty. I do like it here.

Last year, my company bought another company which distributes the Shopwise ads to your mailbox every week. These are the pizza coupons, Rite Aid and Value City ads with the missing child picture on the back (Have You Seen Me?). I work on the Valassis insert (FSI-Free Standing Insert) in the Sunday paper. We do not have the missing child on our insert but we do have a Valassis banner on the front page.

This Sunday, we are unveiling two new items in our weekly ad:
1.) The Valassis FSI and Shopwise banners are no more. We are officially introducing Redplum. Go to the website for some sweet deals.

2.) Our Sunday FSI will be running a picture of a missing child on the back page.

I’ve got to tell you how amazing the missing child program has been. Here are a few stories we heard from Vince Giuliano, the man in charge of the program in our company:

1.) This program started after Adam Walsh was abducted. The people at Advo (the company Valassis bought last year) were so moved by his disappearance, they jumped over multiple hurdles to get pictures of kids on the back of the Shopwise weekly ad.
2.) The first girl ever featured on the Shopwise ad was never recovered. Every few years, we run her picture again.
3.) The ads have helped recover 146…make that 147 kids
4.) Most people who ID the kids are kids themselves because they are the ones getting the mail. Also, the kids recognize missing kids in their classroom.
5.) One kid identified himself by a baby picture. He never knew he had been taken.

We have been gearing up for these two huge launches for several months now. A member of the missing child department came to talk to us about the challenges of running a child’s picture on the back of our ad. There are certain ads we can’t run with the missing child’s picture. The size of our ads was also reduced on the back. It has been challenging for us but what this guy said during the meeting made most in the room tear up.

“When we find that first child…and I mean WHEN we find him, we will have a huge party.”

The party meant nothing to me. The part about finding this little boy lifted my heart, gave my efforts here more purpose. People kind of laugh when they find out I print coupons for a living but now it is so much more than that.


In the November 25, 2007 Shopwise inserts, we ran this picture:

I actually kept this ad with me and brought it to work. Was it so I could look for the child? Well, no. It was the Omaha Steaks ad just above the missing child photo. I was thinking about ordering from Omaha Steaks for Christmas. A few weeks later, we received this communication about the boy in the above photo:

A young man in North Carolina is no longer missing and is surely facing an entirely different holiday than the one he imagined just a few days ago. His life was changed when a friend’s father knocked on the door and showed him two photos on the back of a piece of mail. “Is this you, son?” asked his friend’s dad, who happens to also be a police officer on the local force. Also at the door were the teacher from his school who had originally recognized his image in the mail, his principal, and another member of the local police force. He looked at the group and simply said, “Yes, that’s me.” He then added, “I’d like to call my mother now.”

The young man and the toddler on the pictures in the mail were five-year-old Francis Coleman and the image created by forensic artists of how he may look at age 16. Francis, now 18 and no longer known by his given name, had been missing since 1994. The age-progressed image of the teen must have been pretty accurate for his teacher to take it to her principal with the question, “Could this be…?” They agreed that it looked enough like him to call the local authorities who then made contact with the young man himself and the National Center For Missing & Exploited Children.

“A picture in a mailbox, with the technology of an age progression, was able to be placed in the hands of a teacher, who took a moment to look, made a heroic call to the National Center, and ended the nightmare of a searching parent. This amazing recovery of a boy missing for more than 13 years is proof of the power of our program to span the barriers of time and distance.” said Vince Giuliano, SVP Government Relations and founder of the America’s Looking for Its Missing Children® Program.

Francis Coleman is the 147th child to be safely recovered as a direct result of our America’s Looking for Its Missing Children® Program. On behalf of Valassis and our program partners, NCMEC and the USPS, we offer congratulations and thanks to everyone involved in Francis’s safe recovery including Firestone, the sponsor of his age-progressed photo. We would like to offer special thanks to all associates of the Durham printing facility for printing the wrap resulting in this recovery. Last but not least, please join us in special congratulations to all associates of the Atlanta branch, our official branch of recovery.

So, take a look this Sunday at the RedPlum insert and please take a good look at Jonah, too. He might be closer than you think and his family is looking for him.