The Mauritanian: Redacted Ads

The challenge was scale and consistency: making an interactive experience work identically across 12,000 physical sites with different lighting, angles, weather and wear, without asking a single user to download an app. At that scale, the campaign stops being a set of posters and becomes distributed physical infrastructure. It has to be engineered like one.

To ensure absolute synergy between the physical assets and the digital experience, our unified team managed the entire project lifecycle:

Concept & Physical Design

We designed the posters as authentic classified documents: dense government type, official stamps, and heavy black redaction bars concealing the truth of Slahi's detention. A single instruction and an integrated QR code invited passers-by to see what wasn't meant to be seen.

The Technology

Our custom WebAR image-tracking platform runs entirely in the smartphone browser. Scan the code, point the camera, and the redactions dissolve in real time. No app store, no download, no drop-off. Critically, the creative and the technology were one artefact: the bold redaction graphics that carried the concept also gave our tracking engine the high-contrast features it needed to lock on instantly in daylight or darkness, head-on or at an angle. The design was the marker.

Deployment at Scale

We rolled the campaign out across 12,000 physical sites, each one validated as a reliable tracking surface despite wildly varying real-world conditions: lighting, viewing angles, weather and wear. At that scale, a poster campaign stops being print and becomes distributed physical infrastructure. We ran it like one: a single governed system, from print spec to real-time render.

Because there were zero handoffs between the team designing the physical markers and the engineers writing the AR code, tracking fidelity was bulletproof across all 12,000 sites. That reliability drove high dwell times and an explosion of organic sharing: passers-by instinctively screen-recorded the reveal, converting a static OOH buy into thousands of user-generated broadcasts. This is what one integrated framework makes possible: a bold idea, deployed across an entire city's worth of physical locations, behaving with the consistency of a single product. Whether the canvas is a film campaign or a destination, the discipline is the same.