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MEDIA

Picture This: Marketers Let Emojis Do the

Talking
Advertising

By ROBERT D. HOF MARCH 6, 2016

The condom brand Durex has used World AIDS Day as a marketing hook for years,
but for the most recent edition it tried something different: a condom emoji.

Durex said there was no icon that communicated a desire for safe sex, so it
started a campaign to provide one on smartphone keyboards. The consortium that
sets standards for characters and emojis has yet to approve it, but the mere fact that
Durex started the campaign prompted 210 million mentions on Twitter and, by
Durex’s estimates, drew 2.6 billion media impressions worldwide.

Such is the power of emojis. And more companies are taking notice.

“There’s a lot of brand demand for emojis,” said Ross Hoffman, senior director
of global brand strategy at Twitter, which recently started offering custom emojis for
companies to use in advertising. That is because some 92 percent of the online
population now uses emojis, according to a study by Emogi, a start-up that uses
them to let people indicate how they feel about particular ads. Swyft Media, which
creates alternate phone keyboards featuring multiple emojis, says people send six

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billion of them a day.

Brands like emojis for several other reasons. For one, they reach ad-averse
millennials, sailing past ad-blocking software. They are visual, which makes them a
natural fit for popular messaging apps such as Snapchat and Instagram and also
appeals to international audiences. And because they are meant to be shared, the
brand images are distributed widely, free.

“All of a sudden, the brand is in this very personal conversation between friends
and family,” said Evan Wray, the chief executive of Swyft Media.

Now, emojis are everywhere in marketing. When the Beatles catalog was made
available on nine music streaming services in December, Spotify provided an emoji
of the band’s “Abbey Road” cover to people who used the hashtag #BeatlesSpotify on
Twitter. That helped set Spotify apart; according to Twitter, its hashtag was
mentioned in four times as many Twitter posts as the straightforward #Beatles
hashtag.

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Starbucks, Disney and more than a

dozen other companies have each paid Twitter more than $1 million for designs
combined with various kinds of ads. During the Super Bowl, people who used the
hashtag #PepsiHalftime got a reply that included a soda can emoji with musical
notes floating out from it. For the Feb. 21 introduction of its new smartphone,
Samsung rolled out on Twitter a custom emoji featuring its virtual-reality headset,
along with several kinds of ads.

For many companies, one emoji is not enough. Ahead of its annual Kitten Bowl
animal adoption show before the Super Bowl, the Hallmark Channel offered an
alternate phone keyboard developed by the mobile marketing company Snaps that
featured “cat-lete” emojis such as “Puma Esiason.”

Emojis are also spreading further afield in marketing. 20th Century Fox used
them on a Los Angeles billboard to promote the movie “Deadpool.” IHOP
Restaurants redesigned its logo in the style of emojis.

Some companies have tried a little too hard to be hip. Last year, Chevrolet sent

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out a news release written entirely in emojis, perplexing many people. When
Goldman Sachs used emojis to tweet news of its 2015 report about millennials on
Twitter, the ploy backfired. One person commented on Twitter: “@GoldmanSachs
now explain credit default swaps in emoji pls.” In Bristol, England, emoji-festooned
McDonald’s billboards were defaced with a vomit emoji.

The bungles haven’t slowed down brands’ embrace of emojis. That is mostly
because they convey emotion, the precious currency of marketers.

Some companies are even starting to quantify those emotions to provide a more
nuanced view of ad effectiveness than clicks or impressions. Emogi’s “emotion
engine” analyzes data on how people use emojis to reveal their sentiments about ads.
Marketers can use that data to tweak campaigns or target promising audience
segments, said Travis Montaque, the chief executive of Emogi.

Not all companies can count on their branded emojis catching on. How many
people really want to send (or worse, receive) the diaper brand Luvs’ “Momojis” for
diapers and baby poop? That is why some brands have attached themselves to more
universal symbols.

Taco Bell last year mounted a campaign for a generic taco emoji. A few months
after the emoji became official last July, the company created a “taco emoji engine”
that allows people to tweet the taco, along with another emoji. An automated
program sends back one of 700 mash-ups of the two. Fans have used the engine
756,000 times since November.

“That’s how Taco Bell could own it,” said Winston Binch, chief digital officer at
Deutsch, the lead agency on the campaign. “It’s not just a one-off ad, it’s an ongoing
connection with a brand.”

Other companies have devised more direct ways to profit from standard emojis.
Domino’s Pizza lets people order a pie by tweeting a pizza slice emoji. It’s not that
easy, since customers first must set up an online ordering account, and the company
follows up with a Twitter direct message to confirm the order. Still, for its “business-
moving” idea, the novel transaction system won the ad industry’s top award for
breakthrough marketing at last summer’s Cannes Lions advertising conference.

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Of course, this could all be a fad. But many marketers think emojis are here to
stay. Mark DiMassimo, the chief executive and chief creative officer of the agency
DiMassimo Goldstein, said that emojis were likely to spread from messaging to
social media and beyond.

He cited Facebook’s addition on Feb. 24 of five new emojis to its thumbs-up

“like” symbol. Chevrolet promptly ran an ad for the 2016 Malibu suggesting that
people tap the new “love” emoji on Facebook.

“The best uses of emojis haven’t been done yet,” Mr. DiMassimo said.

A version of this article appears in print on March 7, 2016, on page B1 of the New York edition with the
headline: Marketers Let Emojis Say It With Pictures.

© 2016 The New York Times Company

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