First brand with its own emoji

The first commercial brand to be recognised in an emoji was Coca-Cola. This came about when the company partnered up with Twitter in 2015. From 18 September until the end of the year, typing #ShareaCoke into a tweet brought up an emoji of two clinking Coke bottles. The emoji was part of a paid-for marketing campaign devised by Coca-Cola’s creative agency Wieden + Kennedy.

Later in 2015, Pepsi and Anheuser-Busch followed suit with paid-for emoji Twitter campaigns of their own. Pepsi went even further in June 2016 with #PepsiMoji, enabling Twitter users to add Pepsi branded stickers to their photos. And Twitter has now opened up its Promoted #Stickers service to other marketers for a cool US$500,000 (£385,000) a go.