Pope and Kim Kardashian help turn emojis into marketing phenomenon

What do the Pope, Pepsi, Playtex tampons and reality-television star Kim Kardashian have in common? They all exist in emoji form, the messaging icons that have gone beyond smiley faces to become a marketing phenomenon.

On Monday, Ms Kardashian released a set of emojis themed on her, on to the App Store. Popemoji is a set of cartoon icons developed by Swyft Media to coincide with the pontiff’s visit to the US earlier this year.

Pepsi has made a short film and an emoji keyboard while Playtex uses emoji sentiment analysis to understand how women are feeling about its products.

“It’s been this concentrated burst of emoji fever,” says Robert Candelino, vice-president and general manager for haircare at Unilever, the consumer goods group. “We saw emojis emerging as this new social vernacular, by which three-quarters of people in [the US] are communicating in a daily basis.”

Consumers are spending more time in messaging apps from Facebook Messenger to Instagram, the photo-sharing site on which nearly half the captions contain an emoji, and less time where marketers have been used to reaching them: in front of the TV.

Emojis are also becoming a business, with start-ups employing teams of artists to design up-to-the-minute images and advising marketers eager to become part of consumers’ conversations.

“Emojis are the largest shift in consumer behaviour on the internet since social media,” says Travis Montaque, founder of Emogi, a marketing data company.

Walt Disney, the media group, allowed Twitter users who used the hashtag #StarWars on Twitter to automatically insert an icon of a droid into a tweet. You can order a pizza from Domino’s by simply sending a pizza emoji via SMS.

Brands want to create a “visual lexicon” that people can incorporate into their online conversations, says Christian Brucculeri, chief executive of Snaps, a company that creates branded content, such as emojis, “stickers” and gifs.

The company has worked with 75 brands including fast-food chain Burger King, Unilever and Comedy Central, the television network, and says users have shared 100m images through messaging and social media.

The company is working on a new product for retailers that will attach emojis to digital coupons, which consumers can add to their mobile wallets and use in stores.

“We are seeing an increase in visual communications among consumers. Brands want to be part of that, whether with emojis or gifs and videos or animated experiences,” says Mr Brucculeri.

For Unilever’s Dove brand, Snaps made an emoji keyboard consisting of 27 curly-haired women with various hair lengths, hair colours and skin tones, as part of its “Love Your Curls” campaign. The keyboard has been downloaded more than 850,000 times since its launch on November 4.

For the second season of the Comedy Central sitcom Broad City, an emoji, sticker and gif keyboard were aimed at “superfans” who might spread the word about the show, says Lesley Robin, director of social strategy. “We’re always looking to reach our fans where they already are, using their existing behaviours,” she says. “Fans of Broad City are heavily into messaging: texting their girlfriends, using emojis on various apps.”

Evan Wray, co-founder of Swyft media, says that if companies are strategic about their approach, a consumer can quickly become “brand advocate”. For example, placing a Dell laptop emoji in a “Back to School keyboard” or creating a L’Oréal set of emojis that people want to share with friends and family.

“Three to four years ago, in every meeting people were talking about disruption: how do we break through the clutter?” says Ms Robin. “Now the real key is figuring out how people are interacting with new technology and new platforms and taking advantage of that behaviour. Not by disrupting but by paying attention to what they’re doing and then giving them something to use in that experience.”

TheAmplify, an internet marketing agency, works with brands including 20th Century Fox and US retailer JC Penney to analyse how people are talking about their brands on social media.

Justin Rezvani, chief executive, says demand drove the business. “We started with no funding in a living room, no VC, no real investment, I coded the platform myself,” he says. “Twenty months later, we have a multimillion-a-year corporation with earnings before interest, depreciation and amortisation in the millions.”

Other emoji businesses include San Francisco-based iMoji and Idibon, where former Stanford linguist Tyler Schnoebelen helps marketers understand how to use emojis authentically in communications including customer service.

Emogi lets people use emojis to react to online advertisements. To close a pop-up ad, the viewer clicks on the emoji that represents how they feel about it. The company is partnering with IBM to analyse sentiment and help marketers target their online advertising based on the information they get from its emoji-infused ads.

Mr Montaque expects this sort of online temperature-taking to be of particular interest to marketers during the US presidential election. “We see 2016 being a big year in political advertising as they look to influence voters’ opinion,” he says.