Now that we can see that the custom emojis on Twitter are an ad unit, there are a few more interesting things to point out about the campaign with Coke.
It appears that the company has leveraged stars of its acquired video platform, Vine, with a lot of them tweeting/vining to their vast number of followers about it. The campaign, while a bit murky, seems to be an attempt to break a goofy (probably non-existent) world record:
Here are some Viners:
https://twitter.com/Cody/status/644560517915213825
These folks are in on it, too:
Coke is just trying to get the hashtag and emoji combo for #ShareACoke as much reach as possible. Like any ad. Or any other campaign. The custom emojis are just native content…albeit cooler than other native content we get thrown in our faces. Plus, I don’t think there’s going to be an Emoji Ad blocker anytime soon.
This particular campaign is also something driven by Niche, the company Twitter acquired earlier this year. The team is now a part of the brand strategy group at Twitter. That company’s focus was to put advertisers in touch with social media celebrities. Lots of moving parts here, all in-house though for Twitter. Which is huge. All we need now is some Periscope action and this one will go down as a “run of network” campaign. I mean, they just launched web profiles, so I’m sure they’re collecting who their big stars will and could be.
Is it working? I suppose. The #ShareACoke hashtag has been a worldwide trending topic for the past few hours. It’s actually nice to see that Coke didn’t also buy the top trending ad position, they let this one bubble up “organically.” I mean, as organically as it can be with paid celebs tweeting about it.
Twitter + Vine + Niche = Happy #Brands
In other words, the ad group is firing on all cylinders with this one.