The D-Day Darlings.

The challenge

The D-Day Darlings are one of the UK's best-loved wartime acts - a 1940s-styled vocal group who reached the final of Britain's Got Talent. The brief was deceptively hard: fill venues, grow the Voices Choir spin-off and build genuine national awareness, all without diluting the period authenticity that makes the act special.

A wartime act living on TikTok could easily have felt like a gimmick. The whole job was to grow a modern digital audience while keeping the act's emotional honesty completely intact.

What we did

We've run the Darlings' full digital presence for over five years. The engine is TikTok-first social media management, with paid social and email layered on top to convert that attention into ticket sales for live shows.

Alongside the core act, we cross-promoted the Voices Choir spin-off to the same warm audience, and acted as long-term brand stewards rather than a campaign-by-campaign agency - so the strategy compounded year on year instead of resetting.

The results

Five years in, the act has built a TikTok following of 95.4K and 1.7M total likes, with social driving real-world ticket sales and a partnership that's still going strong.

More importantly, the numbers came without compromise. The growth was built on the act as it actually is, not a watered-down version of it.

The paid social results

Alongside the organic work we've run 21 Meta campaigns for the group's Voices Choir arm - the community choir spin-off that turns the act's national audience into paying members. It's a lead-generation problem, and it's where the paid media side of the account earns its keep.

Across the eight highest-spending lead campaigns, the account has produced 1,341 Meta leads at an average cost per lead of £3.15 from £4,227 of tracked spend. The best-performing campaign brought leads in at £1.56 each.

Figures taken from Meta Ads Manager for the Voices Choir ad account, covering campaigns run between February 2025 and May 2026. A separate engagement campaign delivered 6,752 post engagements at £0.02 each.

Two things are worth pulling out of that table. First, cost per lead fell as the account matured - the May 2026 campaign ran at less than half the cost per lead of the April 2025 one, because five years of audience data and creative testing compounds. Second, the leads are cheap because the organic audience did the warming up first. Paid didn't have to buy attention from scratch; it converted attention we'd already built.

Why it worked

We never tried to modernise the act. The content celebrates the period - real veterans, real audiences, real wartime songs - and that emotional honesty is exactly what travels on a feed. It is the same principle behind our UGC and creator content work: unpolished and true beats slick and hollow.

Authenticity isn't a content pillar you bolt on; it's the thing audiences can feel instantly. By trusting the act to be itself, the social presence became a genuine extension of the live experience rather than a marketing layer sitting on top of it.

What the client says

After five years, Katie Ashby - founder and lead singer of The D-Day Darlings - recorded this on camera with the group. The full transcript is next to the video.