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After Coca-Cola, and most recently Dove and the Indian government, automaker Toyota is the latest brand looking to get in on the emoji craze on Twitter.
Toyota and the social platform created a custom emoji that makes a fan finger emoji pop up when a user types the hashtag #letsgofans. The hashtag is a sporty derivative of Toyota’s longstanding tagline, “Let’s go places.”
“This is our way of providing Toyota’s sports fans more ammunition to express themselves,” said Bryan DeSena, account director at Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles. “We are thinking of it as a digital tailgate cheer.”
The goal is to get fans to download FanMoji, the custom keyboard app that Toyota recently launched as a part of its new sports marketing campaign. The keyboard is a downloadable app and includes hyper-specific football emojis and stickers that let fans express their feelings at peak emotional moments of a game across different platforms.
— Tanya Dua (@tanyadua) November 13, 2015
“We don’t just want to run ads on Twitter to get people to download FanMoji, we also want to give them some more value,” DeSena said.
Toyota is also promoting a contest around the games that are scheduled for Sunday, Monday and Thursday. With “Twitter’s Loudest Tailgate,” the brand will encourage NFL fans to use custom emoji followed by a hashtag of their team’s city. The team with the most mentions will win. The winning team will be announced Nov. 20.
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Toyota is trying to position itself as a more exciting choice for its customers by aligning itself with football. “For the Rush of Sports” is Toyota’s broader sports campaign and also includes four sports-themed spots. It focuses on amplifying sports fans’ enthusiasm for the teams they support.
With emojis rising in popularity, Twitter has been trying to capitalize on the trend and collaborate with brands to create custom emojis. Coca-Cola was the first company to try it out, with Twitter recording 170,500 mentions of its #ShareaCoke hashtag that created an emoji of two clinking Coke glasses when it was typed. Starbucks and Dove are some other brands that have followed suit, and more are sure to follow.
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