Coffee cups carry illustrations of missing people in Australia

It's National Missing Persons Week in Australia this week, and to help highlight those who are missing, a new campaign prints professional illustrations of six missing people onto takeaway coffee cups.

Twenty of Melbourne's top cafes will serve the takeaway biodegradable cups. The work, created by WhiteGrey Melbourne for the Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN), was a collaboration between families, artists and writers to create an illustrated portrait of that person and their story. The campaign "replaces stark, grainy missing persons photos with human reflections and stories," explains MPAN CEO, Loren O'Keefe.

While the idea of printing missing people's images on everyday products isn't new -- we've all seen the flyers, the milk cartons, and it's even been done on money, in Belgium's Coins of Hope campaign via Wunderman -- this campaign gives it an artistic bent that hopefully will engage coffee consumers with the stories behind the missing people, highlighting the 38,000 Australians who go missing each year. It's also good PR, gaining widespread exposure on TV news channels and in other media.