Always’ #LikeAGirl Campaign Takes On Sexist Emojis :-)
Back in 2014 Always jumped on the biggest video advertising trend of the year – femvertising – with its “#LikeAGirl” campaign.
The P&G brand released the video to try and challenge traditional gender stereotypes and drive home the message that being “girlie” isn’t a bad thing. The ad performed so well that the personal care company used a shorter version of the same spot as its 2015 Super Bowl spot.
Clearly a company that knows how to jump on a trend when it sees one, Always is at it again. In its latest ad campaign, it takes on the gender roles of emojis.
While there are a few gender-ambiguous emojis out there, the majority of sports and work-related emojis feature male faces. Or as one of the young girls in the video says, “unless you count being a bride as a profession”.
So when you consider young girls send over a billion emojis every day, it seems only right that they should expect to see emojis that better represent them.
But it’s not just young girls. Emojis allow users – no matter their age or gender – to express themselves in a simple and concise way and their followers to understand their sentiment quickly and easily.
And, interestingly, happy faces account for 44.8% of total global emoji usage. Sad faces only account for 14.3% (according to Swiftkey), which makes sense when recent data released by Unruly found that happiness is the most common intense emotion felt by viewers when they watch video ads globally.
Unruly predicted ’emojitising’ would be one of the biggest trends in 2016, and we’re definitely seeing it gain momentum. Facebook recently unveiled “Reactions”, a new set of six emojis Facebook users can use to express more complex emotions than the simple Like button we have come to know.
Facebook users are now allowed to express feelings of love, laughter, happiness, sadness and anger to express a diverse set of feelings for a number of different status updates.
The beauty of emojis for brands is that they can be used to convey a multitude of feelings in a way that consumers are already interacting with each other. CNN released a range of emojis for the US Presidential election, so voters could show support for their favorite candidates by sharing their emojified face with their networks. Dove also offered a line of curly-haired emojis in a bid to break the hegemony of straight-haired emoticons to allow women and girls blessed with curly locks to fully express themselves.
Brands that are able to jump on this to produce new, innovative campaigns that are authentic to their brand – as Always was able to do – will be the ones who are able to stand out from the competition.
Kudos to Always for jumping on one of the year’s hottest trends, while still getting its brand messaging across and maintaining the core concept of its #LikeAGirl campaign.
As part of the campaign, Always asks what girl emoji you would want to see using #LIKEAGIRL to show girls everywhere that anything and everything is possible. Which one would you choose?
