Gulliver Turns Kyiv's Largest Media Facade Into a Monument to Hope
Gulliver's 'Train of Hope' is a 2023 outdoor, experiential, and content campaign created by Kyiv-based agency oversize, deploying a naked-eye 3D video on Europe's largest media facade to honour the Kyiv metro as a symbol of collective resilience during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Deloitte.
The campaign launched in August 2023 in Ukraine, at a moment when the physical fabric of everyday life had been fundamentally altered by conflict. Rather than promoting products or commercial offers, Gulliver positioned its facade — the centrepiece of the Gulliver shopping centre in central Kyiv — as a civic communications platform. The installation depicted a Kyiv metro train in motion, rendered with a naked-eye 3D effect that created the illusion of the train emerging from the building itself. The creative concept treated the metro not as infrastructure but as a living emblem of endurance: a system that continued operating beneath a city under attack, carrying millions of residents through the ordinary rhythms of survival, according to Rau Ua.
In Ukraine, where the full-scale invasion beginning in February 2022 transformed public spaces into sites of both danger and defiance, this choice of subject matter carried immediate cultural resonance. The Kyiv subway had served as a shelter, a refuge, and a daily lifeline simultaneously. By projecting this image at monumental scale onto one of the most visible buildings in Kyiv, Gulliver aligned its brand identity with the continuity of urban life and the preservation of shared civic space, according to Izi Institute. The campaign comprised a single media asset, described by oversize as a tribute to the metro and a reminder that, in the heart of Kyiv, there is a train that carries more than just passengers — it carries hope. Creative direction was led by Taras Borovyk, with VFX and CGI executed by Kirill Udovenko.
Gulliver's strategic pivot with 'Train of Hope' reflects a precise reading of consumer psychology under sustained national crisis. The campaign's core insight — that public spaces become emotionally amplified during conflict — informed every element of its execution. The Kyiv metro, operating continuously despite the invasion, had acquired a symbolic weight that no conventional retail message could match or borrow from without authentic creative justification.
According to Inventure Com Ua, the Gulliver shopping centre encompasses approximately 45,200 square metres of leasable area and houses around 150 stores, making it one of the most prominent retail destinations in central Kyiv. In this context, the decision to suspend commercial messaging entirely and instead offer the building's facade as a public tribute represented a significant strategic commitment. The campaign repositioned Gulliver not as a retailer but as a cultural institution invested in Kyiv's communal identity.
The competitive landscape for large-format OOH and retail-destination branding in Ukraine includes major shopping centres such as Ocean Plaza and Sky Mall, both of which maintained varying degrees of commercial programming during the same period. Against this backdrop, Gulliver's choice to produce a purpose-driven experiential installation distinguished it as a brand willing to subordinate short-term commercial imperatives to long-term civic relevance. Retail media globally had been accelerating rapidly — global retail-media spending was estimated at approximately the equivalent of a fast-growing segment, and growth projections for 2023 remained strong across major markets — but in Ukraine, the more urgent currency was trust and emotional legitimacy, not reach metrics. The 'Train of Hope' campaign, developed by oversize and led creatively by Taras Borovyk, converted the Gulliver building itself into the medium, making the message inseparable from the place.
Kirill Udovenko served as VFX and CGI artist on 'Train of Hope', responsible for the technical execution that made the naked-eye 3D effect possible at the scale of Europe's largest media facade. The challenge of producing convincing forced-perspective three-dimensional imagery for outdoor display — without requiring viewers to wear specialised eyewear — demands precise calibration of viewing angles, depth cues, and motion dynamics relative to the specific geometry of the facade and the most common pedestrian vantage points in the surrounding Kyiv streetscape.
The creative direction by Taras Borovyk shaped a visual language deliberately stripped of commercial signifiers. The central image — a Kyiv metro train in motion — was chosen for its immediate legibility to every resident of the city and its layered connotations: transit, continuity, collective passage, and survival. The train does not arrive at a destination within the film; it moves, perpetually, suggesting both the daily persistence of urban life and the forward momentum of a city refusing stasis under pressure.
Serhii Pyatkov, serving as New Business Director, and Katherina Shpachuk, handling PR, completed the core team at oversize responsible for bringing the installation to public attention across Ukraine. The campaign was published in August 2023, a period when Kyiv's cultural and advertising communities were actively interrogating what responsible brand communication looked like in wartime. By choosing experiential OOH as its primary format — a live, public, unrepeatable experience on a specific building at a specific address in Kyiv — oversize and Gulliver created a work that existed in real space alongside the people it addressed, rather than in a mediated channel one step removed from daily life.
No independently verified performance data for 'Train of Hope' — including footfall uplift, brand-sentiment shift, or media-value equivalency — is publicly available at this time. No entries or awards for this campaign have been confirmed across Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards.
Clapboard rates 'Train of Hope' at 66 out of 100, reflecting a campaign whose creative ambition and civic relevance are structurally sound, even in the absence of quantified outcomes. The score acknowledges the difficulty and risk of producing large-format experiential work in an active conflict zone, the appropriateness of the chosen medium to the message, and the coherence between Gulliver's brand position and the tribute it chose to stage. A retail brand converting its own building into a monument — rather than a promotional surface — represents a category-unusual decision that carries inherent credibility risk if the execution fails to match the ambition. The naked-eye 3D craft delivered by Kirill Udovenko, and the strategic clarity provided by Taras Borovyk's creative direction, ensured the execution met the weight of its own premise.
According to Metropoliten Kiev Ua, the Kyiv metro remains one of the busiest urban transit systems in Ukraine, which amplifies the cultural specificity of the campaign's subject matter for its primary audience. The structural effectiveness of 'Train of Hope' lies in its irreducibility: a single asset, a single idea, a single building in Kyiv, communicating one sentiment that required no supporting copy to be understood by any resident of the city who encountered it.
'Train of Hope' is a 2023 OOH and experiential campaign created by oversize for Gulliver in Kyiv, Ukraine. It features a naked-eye 3D video of a Kyiv metro train on Europe's largest media facade, serving as a tribute to the metro's role as a symbol of resilience during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Oversize, a Kyiv-based advertising agency, created Train of Hope for Gulliver. The campaign team included Creative Director Taras Borovyk, VFX and CGI Artist Kirill Udovenko, New Business Director Serhii Pyatkov, and PR lead Katherina Shpachuk, all working together on the August 2023 Ukraine launch.
Gulliver's media facade is identified as Europe's largest, giving the naked-eye 3D installation an exceptional physical scale in central Kyiv. This scale transformed the building from a retail destination into a civic landmark, making the campaign's tribute to the Kyiv metro visible across a wide area of the city in August 2023.
The Kyiv metro continued operating throughout Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, becoming a symbol of collective endurance and daily survival. Gulliver and oversize recognised its heightened emotional resonance as a shared public space, making it a credible and culturally specific subject for a brand tribute in 2023.
Clapboard rates Train of Hope at 66 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative and civic coherence — a retail brand converting its Kyiv facade into a public monument — while noting the absence of publicly verified performance metrics or confirmed award recognition from major international shows.
Kirill Udovenko applied naked-eye 3D, a forced-perspective CGI technique that creates the illusion of three-dimensional depth on a flat facade without requiring specialised eyewear. Calibrated to the viewing angles of Kyiv pedestrians, the effect depicted a Kyiv metro train appearing to emerge from the Gulliver building's surface.
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