This company takes emojis to a whole new, measurable level

Emogi—pronounced emoji—is a content engine and technology company that works with brands to create deeper connections with consumers by using those little digital images in different ways.

Travis Montaque founded Emogi in 2011, and while the company has stayed under the radar in terms of press, it’s known among a number of large marketers. Emogi has worked with McDonald’s, Mucinex, Tide, Ikea, Bose and more.

So what exactly does Emogi do? It creates branded content, images and GIFs to help marketers better connect with consumers while they’re using different social platforms, whether texting on a chat app or commenting on a post. Emogi’s content can run across a wide range of platforms, such as iMessage, TextNow, Facebook Messenger, Twitch, Plenty of Fish, Gboard, ChatAll, Bobble, ReBoard, Uber Social, textPlus, and trutext.

Last summer, Reckitt Benckiser’s Mucinex reached out to Emogi to help figure out how the brand could stay top of mind for consumers during the 2017 cold and flu season when they were messaging about their symptoms or feeling sick.

The brand was looking for ways to tap into culture and go "beyond traditional advertising with new opportunities for the brand," said Brian Dolan, senior brand manager at Reckitt Benckiser. "We hadn’t done anything like this before," he said.

In addition to leveraging Mucinex’s Mr. Mucus character, Emogi created relevant content for consumers around cold and flu season topics, like being "tired," "sick," "cold," or having "mucus" or "chest congestion." It even tapped into phrases like, "Feel better."

Using its Conversation Graph, Emogi knows the best times, places and ways to engage consumers on different platforms for optimal shares of the branded content. The target for Mucinex, Dolan said, was U.S.-based consumers between 25 and 54 years old.

Dolan said that people shared the Mr. Mucus images four times more than just a symptom or other emojis on their phone when talking about feeling sick. He also "underestimated the brand logo," which people shared more than 7,500 times in 30 days with close friends and family, Emogi calculated.

The effort yielded 107,000 conversations per day from December 2017 to January 2018 about cold and flu symptoms with Mucinex content. Dolan said McCann Health, Mucinex’s advertising agency, also consulted with Emogi throughout the process.

Every brand is trying to break through the clutter and get intimate with consumers on the big social platforms, like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, said Dolan, but those networks are "super crowded."

"[Emogi] is a relatively untapped platform for brands, and people do share this stuff and it didn’t seem like they found it annoying," said Dolan. "This is a whole other whitespace we can tackle."

He added that it’s difficult to get a grasp on direct sales impact, but Mucinex was the only brand in the whole category to have significant equity gains in the "brand for me" and "leading the way" sections, following the campaign.

The month-long initiative also garnered some interesting learnings about Mucinex’s consumers, said Dolan, like the fact that conversations around feeling sick as well as the usage of the branded images skyrocketed each evening between 5 pm and 11 pm.

"Our goal as a brand is to end the misery of being sick and a lot of times it’s about providing good medicine, but other times, it’s about giving people a chance to laugh," he said.

Montaque told Campaign that Mucinex was able to own "10% share of voice in their particular category" with the effort.

"We’re excited to be working with brands like Mucinex who are leaning in and finding creative strategies to integrate contextual messaging," he said.