The night Toronto froze — and the ghost they flew to the top.
On May 14, 2026, the ICEMAN rollout turned the CN Tower into a block of ice in front of the whole world. Somewhere inside that production was Casper — @caspertheghos7 — the masked rooftopper who had spent years photographing that tower from every other roof in the city.
Every city has one building that belongs to everybody. Toronto's is 553 metres tall, and on the night of May 14, 2026 it stopped being a landmark and became a screen. Seventy-five projectors, a 300-person crew, three weeks of prep and a real-time 3D animation wrapped the CN Tower in ice for the release of ICEMAN — the surprise triple-drop, with Maid of Honour and Habibti, that Drake livestreamed to the world with aerial shots of his own skyline spliced between unreleased videos.
The numbers, reported by CBC News in its profile of Studio AM's Anil Mohabir — the Toronto designer who pulled the stunt off — read like a spec sheet for a small city: 2,572,000 lumens of total light output, 138 million pixels, projectors staggered at different heights around the tower's full circumference. The Globe and Mail, TMZ and NME all ran it within hours. For a week, pop culture's centre of gravity sat at the base of Toronto's tallest structure — and in the days that followed, crews were spotted back at the tower continuing to shoot ICEMAN video material.
The casting that made too much sense
Inside that machine came a piece of casting so on-the-nose the internet would have invented it anyway: Casper, the city's signature masked rooftopper, cast in a video production for the campaign — staged at the top of the CN Tower itself. Her whole account, @caspertheghos7, is a years-long love letter to exactly this skyline, shot from ledges most of the city doesn't know exist. The one roof she could never touch was the one that towers over all of them. The ICEMAN production put her there — with a call sheet, a safety plan and a crew, Toronto image-maker @dearbish working the camera side of the shoot.
The city's most famous unauthorised photographer, brought up the authorised way — to the only roof that outranks all of hers.
— The DGTL Influence viewWhy this moment travels
Campaigns buy reach; they can't buy meaning. What made the CN Tower takeover land globally was that it was unmistakably of Toronto — its designer, its skyline, its artist. Folding a figure like Casper into that story is the same instinct at a subcultural scale: she carries an audience of 162,000 people who follow her precisely because she shows them their own city from angles that feel stolen. When the biggest legitimate production in the city's history reaches down into that world for casting, both sides get something real — the campaign gets credibility at street level, and a creator who built everything anonymously gets the most public co-sign there is.
- 75 projectors and a 300-person crew froze the CN Tower in real-time 3D — assembled in roughly three weeks by Toronto's Studio AM (via CBC News).
- 2,572,000 lumens and 138,240,000 pixels of total output — the tower as the country's largest screen.
- Three surprise albums — ICEMAN, Maid of Honour and Habibti — dropped at midnight during the livestream.
- One masked Toronto rooftopper, cast in a campaign video shoot at the very top. Read her full profile → Casper (@caspertheghos7).
For DGTL, the ICEMAN summer is a proof point for a thesis we've been developing all year: Toronto's most valuable media assets are its subcultures, and the creators who front them are ready for prime time. That thesis has a name — The Climb, our documentary concept on the rooftopping culture this city invented — and after May, its central character has a mainstream credit to her name.
Culture-first campaigns, built in Toronto.
From skyline takeovers to subculture casting — DGTL matches brands and productions with the creators who make a city pay attention.