Sign up for afaqs! Newsletters
Tracking down a lost panda and other things
Bluetooth-enabled tracking system Tile helps find lost things, sometimes precious.
Tile’s first major ad campaign was inspired by an actual incident. A young girl lost her stuffed animal in a busy city, only to be reunited later with the help of the Tile community. The storyboard narrates the tale from the perspective of Ernie, a stuffed panda, and to bring to life what his owner, Lucy, might have imagined her ‘best friend’ going through in trying to find his way back to her.
However, Ernie gets more and more lost till he is helped home by ‘good neighbours’ he meets. The good neighbours are a metaphor for the Tile Community.
What is a Tile community?
The Tile community is a group of Tile users. They use an app that helps them find items attached to a Tile dongle within a range of about 200 feet. If stuff gets really lost - which can happen when a plush Panda hops a freight train to the middle of nowhere - you can receive location info from the phones of other Tile users (when these folks approach your missing items, their own apps generate an anonymous update for you to follow).
A handy feature, it is one of Tile’s biggest selling points, informs the campaign’s tagline, “Together we find.”