Advo Calling THIS IS THE STORY of a direct marketer measurably increasing the amount of good and light and happiness in the world.
For 15 years, Advo Inc., the Windsor, CT-based targeted DM services company, has been conducting the America’s Looking for Its Missing Children program. In partnership with the U.S. Postal Service and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), Advo has sent out “Have You Seen Me?” direct mail cards featuring photographs of missing children.
The card pack reaches up to 79 million households across the country each week. That amounts to more than 40 billion pictures of missing children Advo has distributed since 1985. Since its inception, the program has rescued approximately one child out of every seven whose photograph has appeared on a card.
In July, the company found its 100th missing child when a law student in New Orleans recognized the picture of Kathleen Mooney, who had been missing for 18 months, on an Advo card he received in the mail. He had spotted Kathleen a few months earlier while vacationing in Honduras.
The law student contacted NCMEC, which notified the FBI, which in turn notified authorities in Honduras. The FBI and local law enforcement located Kathleen on the Honduran island of Roatan. She was taken to Miami to be reunited with her mother, Vicki LePosa, who lives in Pennsylvania.
The abductor, the child’s non-custodial father, is in a Pennsylvania jail awaiting trial.
“We are grateful to this unsung hero and to the public for taking the time to look at the pictures of missing children they receive in their mailboxes,” says Vince Giuliano, senior vice president of government relations at Advo, who founded the program.
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