DHL sponsor the Rolling Stones tour, and their agency Maverick came to us wanting the band’s tongue and lips brought to life in AR, something fans could wear on their own face rather than just see on a poster or a truck livery.
The tongue is one of the most recognisable logos on earth. Everyone already carries an exact picture of it in their head, so there was no room to get the shape, the colour or the proportions slightly off and hope nobody noticed. It had to read as the real thing the instant it opened, on a screen the size of a phone, moving with a stranger’s face rather than sitting still on a page. A logistics brand and a rock band are an odd pairing on paper, and the tongue was doing the work of holding that pairing together, so it had to look right.
What we built was a face filter that puts the logo directly onto the user rather than beside them. Look into the camera and the mouth opens, the tongue rolls out and unrolls, and the whole thing tracks to your face in real time so it moves the way a mouth actually moves rather than sitting stuck to the middle of the screen. It shipped as an Instagram AR filter, tied to DHL and the Rolling Stones for the buzz around the tour, something to post rather than just look at.
How it was built
We modelled the tongue and lips in 3D from the band’s own mark, matching the original rather than reinterpreting it, because the whole point was instant recognition, not a new take on it. From there we rigged the mouth so it could animate properly: lips parting, tongue extending, curling and rolling back in, rather than a static shape that simply appears and disappears.
Face and object tracking locks the model to the user, so it sits on the mouth and follows it as the head turns, rather than floating in front of the camera like a sticker glued to the lens. That is the difference between a filter people glance at once and one they actually put on, move their head around in and hold up to a friend to try next.
Worth knowing
This ran as an Instagram AR filter, built with agency Maverick for DHL’s sponsorship of the Rolling Stones tour. Meta closed third-party Instagram and Facebook AR effects on 14 January 2025, so a filter built the same way today would ship to TikTok or Snapchat instead, or run as WebAR on a domain nobody else can switch off. The work happened, and it ran on Instagram at the time, on one of the most famous logos in music. That is the part worth being straight about rather than pretending the platform is still live.