When a character wins the nation’s heart in a Christmas TV ad, the next question is obvious: how do people get closer to it than a 30-second spot allows? For SuperValu’s Christmas campaign, working with TBWA, the answer was to put Deermuid the reindeer in everyone’s living room through a social AR filter.
The brief
Deermuid, the young reindeer star of SuperValu’s previous Christmas TV ad, was already loved. As part of the 2022 Christmas campaign, SuperValu and TBWA wanted a way for families to actually interact with him — not just watch him. We built a real-world AR filter for both TikTok and Instagram, so the campaign reached the widest possible audience and demographic spread on the platforms where people were already filming their Christmas.
The craft: recreating a TV character inside a filter
The hard part of branded character AR isn’t the filter mechanics — it’s continuity. Deermuid had been rendered for television with cinematic lighting and detail. The software running social AR filters can’t match a cinema-grade render, so the job was to recreate Deermuid as faithfully as possible within tight real-time constraints: optimised 3D modelling, careful texturing and animation that kept his personality intact at a fraction of the polygon budget. Get that wrong and the beloved TV character becomes an uncanny knock-off; get it right and the filter feels like meeting the real thing.
How it performed
The filter let users drop Deermuid into their own world and interact with him on TikTok and Instagram. It was well-received across all ages — exactly what a family-brand Christmas campaign needs — and extended the life and reach of an expensive TV asset into weeks of user-generated content.
Could you still run this campaign today?
Yes — but the platform mix has changed. This filter ran on TikTok and Instagram; since Meta shut down Spark AR in January 2025, third-party Instagram filters no longer exist. The same campaign today would live on TikTok (Effect House), Snapchat (Lens Studio) — or as a WebAR experience triggered from packaging, in-store media or the TV ad itself, with no social account needed at all. We keep a current breakdown of the options on our AR filters for brands page and in our TikTok vs Snapchat vs WebAR comparison.
What this means for your brand
If you’ve invested in a brand character or campaign asset, an AR filter is one of the cheapest ways to multiply that investment: the audience does the filming, the sharing and the distribution for you. The craft that matters is faithful character translation — that’s what protects the brand equity you’ve already paid for.
See it and build yours
Shots of Deermuid in action are on the SuperValu TikTok AR filter portfolio page, and you can browse the rest of our augmented reality work. Have a character, mascot or campaign that people should be able to meet? Get in touch and we’ll scope it with you.