Finland Emojis

Background

The Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland wanted to renew ThisIsFINLAND's annual Christmas calendar. The aim was to target a younger, global audience rather than families. The challenge was to come up with an idea that would reach a crowd that was not the Ministry's usual audience. The task was to talk about Finland in an unconventional tone with a tongue-in-cheek approach that would describe both Finnish virtues and Finnish vices.

The idea had to work well in social media and mobile since paid media wasn't an option.

Idea

The Christmas calendar needed to position Finland as a digitally savvy and fun country.

If texting, a Finnish innovation, had revolutionised the way people communicated, the use of emojis was doing the same. So it made sense for Finland to become the first country with its own official emojis.

After all, emojis were used to communicate visually rather than verbally and that suited Finns, who are often the strong, silent type.

Emojis were also for more than just Christmas. People would be able to use and share them throughout the year.

30 tongue-in-cheek emojis were created, each descriptive of a particular Finnish emotion. They featured aspects of Finland and Finnishness from "kalsarikännit" (getting drunk alone at home with no intention of going out) to famous Finns like Martti Ahtisaari and Kimi Räikkönen.

The emojis were made available on ThisisFINLAND's Christmas site, xmas. finland.fi, which had 24 hatches. Each day a new emoji was revealed with a bonus emoji on December 29th of ski-jumping legend Matti Nykänen.

Results

The emojis were covered in more than 2,000 stories in global media and got more shares, likes and tweets than any other communications activity ever for Finland. On their launch day, Finland emojis were trending on Twitter with a reach of over three million people. Now several cities in Finland have created their own versions and several other countries have started creating their own.

The emojis appeared in postcards, highschool books and even in a well-known board game. A special summer set of emojis were scheduled for release in the spring 2016.

Our Thoughts

Plenty of campaigns are beginning to use emojis in one form or another. CP+B won a Titanium Lion at Cannes with an idea for Domino's that allowed people to order a pizza by emoji. Singtel in Singapore ran a campaign telling the stories of famous movies in emoji form. It's been described as the world's fastest-growing digital language and, of course, it is mobile-centric. On the surface of it, this idea looks completely bonkers. But it's a smart way of reaching millennials not just because they 'own' emoji but because it's such an un-governmental way for a government to behave.