#1041 2025 · DSP Mutual Fund (with Dentsu Creative Webchutney and Falco Robotics) · Financial services / asset management
Fund brand finds lost children with an offline drone at a festival of 660 million people
the problem
At a mass sacred gathering the mobile network collapses, so no app can help find a lost child
background
The Purna Maha Kumbh in Prayagraj, India (2025) drew an estimated 660 million attendees; at a crowd that dense the cellular network is unusable, so every obvious digital tool — a tracking app, an SMS beacon, a call — fails precisely when a child wanders off. Over 250,000 people, many of them children, had vanished during past events.
A financial brand's conventional response is to sponsor a lost-and-found booth or run a sentimental ad. Both depend on the very network that is down, and both broadcast a message rather than changing an outcome on the ground.
what everyone would do
The textbook response is a tracking app, an emergency hotline, or a lost-child announcement — every one of which needs the mobile network that collapsed under 660 million people. Sponsoring a booth or running a sentimental advertisement broadcasts goodwill but does nothing to actually reunite anyone while the network is down.
what they saw
DSP saw the channel itself is what breaks, so the rescue lived in hardware the crowd carried and a drone reading the terrain — dressing it as the culture's protector made parents trust it in a sacred place.
the move
DSP Mutual Fund turned brand purpose into an offline rescue system instead of an ad. Children arriving received cheap wristbands that beam an ultra-low-frequency geo-signal using 1970s marine-navigation radio-band tech — 1KB of data reaching several kilometres with no cellular or app dependency. If a child went missing, a guardian tapped their band at a Lost & Found centre to activate a search drone, shaped as the Hindu divine protector Garuda and hand-painted to feel like hope in a sacred place, which located the child and dropped a bright colour marker to guide ground rescuers through the crowd.
why it works
The mechanism sidesteps the very constraint that kills the obvious tools: ultra-low-frequency radio needs no carrier signal, so a child's wristband keeps broadcasting when every phone shows no bars, and the drone — flying over heads and under the network — carries the location off the crowded ground to a rescue team. Making it work offline turns the network collapse from a blocker into the reason the solution is novel. The Garuda form is load-bearing, not decoration: in a setting where a hovering machine might read as surveillance, the icon of a celestial protector makes parents hand their children the wristbands and trust the drone, so the technical system gets adopted at the scale needed to matter. Because a fund brand rescued rather than advertised, the association built is trust — the exact attribute a savings-and-investment firm sells.
the payoff
It won a 2026 ADFEST Lotus. The operator reports every wristband-wearing child was reunited, 78% in five minutes — its own claim.
where it breaks
It needs a crowd that both produces the missing-child problem and will accept wearing the token — so it works at ticketed, family-heavy mass events, not in scattered daily emergencies. The transfer depends on a real channel collapse: where ordinary cellular coverage works, a simpler app solution wins on cost and adoption. The hardware (wristbands, drones, marker drops) is expensive to scale to every event and needs buy-in from event authorities, who are the ones who must run it beyond the sponsor. And because the reunion figures are the brand's own report rather than an audited outcome, the mechanism's credibility rests on the award and the independent trade description, not on independently verified numbers.
what came after
The drone system's operators said authorities expressed interest in replicating it for future mass events and disaster zones, pointing the mechanism at emergency response rather than one festival.
references
- [1]ADFEST 2026 Winners — Garuda Rakshak (DSP Mutual Fund)ADFEST, 2026adfest.com
- [2]BestMediaInfo — DSP Mutual Fund & Dentsu Creative deploy Garuda drones to reunite lost children at Kumbh MelaBestMediaInfo, 2025bestmediainfo.com