Emojis, Stickers, GIFs – They’re the REAL DEAL
This is sort of a follow-up post to a pulse blog I wrote over on my LinkedIN. I recently came across an interesting article via NYTimes. The article was about emojis, and how they are becoming a real hot commodity for marketers. For example, the article mentions how brands such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Verizon, and others – paid a hefty sum of $1M to run branded emoji hastag campaigns on Twitter for this year’s Super Bowl (NOTE: they didn’t pay $1M for ONLY emojis. There was a combination of emoji hashtags and other ads). If you want to read more about them you can read an amazing article via AdWeek here.
It’s these little characters with funny faces and expressions that are winning over the masses. I couldn’t help but think how correlated all this was to my previous posts from the past – how content wins the masses.
Now for those who are fairly new to my blog, I’ve been in the content business for quite some time. I’ve followed the trends of mobile messaging apps, since their fruition in Asia a few years ago. Although Asia is a little different in that they use less emojis and more stickers/emoticons, none the less, both fall in the same category – EXPRESSION. And because of this category of expression, brands & marketers alike, are all jumping in the bandwagon vying for parking space. Mobile Messaging has become a game changer, in that users are ever so connected through their devices. Multiple conversations happen simultaneously, and brands want in on those convos. Emojis, stickers, and GIFs – all have a way of taking simple conversations to the next level. I’ll give an example below:
Sample of LINE Messenger (Japan)
Instead of typing “Good luck on your interview” with a reply of “thanks so much” – users can simply use stickers, emojis, and GIFs. This is why brands and marketers want a piece of the action. Users are sending billions upon billions of messages per day across multiple messaging apps. From your Facebook Messenger all the way to SnapChat – people are communicating through content. Still don’t believe me? Well how about the recent integration of GIFs into Twitter’s mobile platform. Through a partnership with GIPHY & Riffsy – Twitter has added an additional means of expression for its users. Searching through hundreds of millions of GIFs to use as a form of expression just made Twitter that much more fun for its users. IMAGINE, what would brands want with all that data?
So back to the NYTimes article. In it, Twitter’s own Senior Director of Global Brand Strategy, Ross Hoffman, states that “there’s a lot of brand demand for emojis.” Now, this is coming from a company like Twitter who’s Q4’15 earnings report states that they earned $710M in revenue for the quarter (HMM, maybe they’re onto something?). Regardless of the fact that Twitter’s user growth has been stagnant, the fact of the matter is brands want emojis. They want to be part of conversations. They want to be inserted into sentences. This is why emojis, stickers, and GIFs are so popular. What’s the saying – A picture is worth a thousand words. That’s what these forms of expression are. Users will continue to use them and conversations will be that much fluent and easier to do.
So yeah – these little guys AND gals, are here to stay.
geeky_yang 