Led By Donkeys: This Is Our Star

• 5 million+ video views across social platforms in the first week
• 850,000+ views within 24 hours of launch
• 50 million+ potential audience reach through broadcast and online news coverage
• Widespread organic sharing across the UK and continental Europe, in multiple languages
• Coverage: BBC News · ITV News · Sky News · The Telegraph · HuffPost · Al Jazeera ·  press across Europe

We’ve collaborated with Led By Donkeys for many years, helping bring their bold ideas to life through technically ambitious projection mapping that turns public spaces into powerful platforms for storytelling and accountability. Together, we share a belief that creativity can spark conversation, challenge power and cut through the noise, using spectacular visual interventions to reach millions both on the streets and online.

On the morning of 31 January 2020 – the day the UK formally left the European Union – we transformed the White Cliffs of Dover into a cinema screen facing Europe.

The large-scale projection featured a film of two Second World War veterans: Sid Daw, 95, who served five years in the infantry across Europe, and Brigadier Stephen Goodall, 97, who served in the Army for 32 years. Speaking directly to the people of France, Germany and the wider continent – with the film subtitled in French and German – they delivered a message of friendship, comradeship and hope on the day of departure.

The location was the message. These are the same cliffs that welcomed soldiers home from Dunkirk in 1940 – the most potent symbol of Britain’s relationship with its continental neighbours. Projecting the veterans’ faces onto that chalk face, looking out across the Channel, gave their words a weight no billboard or broadcast could match.

The film closed with the twelve stars of the EU flag slowly fading, one by one, until a single star remained – and a final line: “This is our star. Look after it for us.”

This wasn’t a conventional advertising campaign. It was a piece of public cinema at landscape scale. It was a live moment of national reflection, timed to the hour of a historic turning point. And it was a media moment designed to travel across borders — literally addressed to an audience on the other side of the Channel.

We delivered the projection for the activation.

Our team:

• Deployed high-output projection systems capable of covering a vast section of the 350ft chalk cliff face
• Managed the technical and logistical challenges of projecting onto a natural, uneven surface in an exposed coastal environment, at night, to a precise broadcast deadline
• Paid for permission activation at one of Britain’s most iconic and symbolically loaded locations
• Access to the site via our preferred partner status and access to Samphire Hoe, owned by Eurotunnel
• Audio soundtrack IRL during the activity, provided by a full PA system 

The campaign was designed from the outset to maximise earned media, social sharing and public conversation on a day when the world’s attention was already on Britain. The film went viral within hours of launch.

This campaign demonstrates the unique power of projection mapping as a tool for advocacy, storytelling and public engagement.

The film was covered across UK national media and picked up by outlets throughout Europe, becoming one of the defining images of Brexit Day. On a day dominated by celebration and ceremony, it offered a different register entirely quiet, human and deeply emotional — and cut through precisely because of it.

The impact on social media was:

• 5 million+ video views across social platforms in the first week
• 850,000+ social views within 24 hours of launch

This was more than a projection. It showed how the right image, in the right place, at the right moment can carry an emotional message across a national border and into millions of homes. Traditional media buying cannot manufacture a moment like this.

The EU’s Brexit co-ordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, posted about the campaign after seeing our work and said the bloc will “look after your star” in a message to the UK public.

The projection was so vast that it was visible from aeroplanes approaching the UK!

Millions saw it. Europe heard it. And one star stayed lit on the cliffs. That is the power of spectacle.

“At its core, our work together has been deeply collaborative and reactive to the news cycle. POW will stop at nothing to make top-quality projections.”

Led By Donkeys