Norwegian Air saw some serious buzz when it decided to announce its latest route, from Oslo to Las Vegas, using only emojis as the URL.
The emojis told social media followers that they could fly to Vegas for cheap on the latest route offered by the long-haul low cost carrier.
The website is still up here, showing how awkward the URL was when typed out. Of course, each emoji corresponds to a string of text, which is how the application knows which emoji to load.
The challenge here was for users to figure out how to type the actual URL in a browser window — and surprisingly, 1600 intrepid social media followers managed to successfully type in the URL during the one day promotional campaign.
Of course, on mobile, all you need to do is type in the actual emojis for it all to work just fine.
It's not clear how many of those folks came via the awkward actual URL or the emoji-laden one. Nonetheless, the campaign was shared widely on Instagram.
The airline told AdWeek that the Millennial appeal of Instagram was why the brand chose the platform to promote its new route:
The campaign on Instagram will reach the target audience differently than they are used to. This part of the overall campaign has been put to work to strengthen the greater story of Las Vegas, to capture the target audiences curiosity, and to communicate the message in an innovative and humorous way.
So will there be more emojiurls in the future?
It's not likely, given how difficult they are to actually type in when not actually using emojis. Not to mention the limited real estate available on the top-level domains that accept emojis.
Currently only a couple, including Western Samoa's .ws, allow emojis. But, since the world's transition mostly to mobile — and the short URLs are long gone — there might soon be sound reasoning for ubiquitous emojiurls.
This could all change if more top-level domains managed to figure out how brands could use emojiurls rather than traditional Latin characters.
There would be a new digital land grab that would no doubt be profitable — and a lot of fun for mobile users to type in their favorite brands.
After all, emojis have taken the world by storm and are already integrated into our standard digital communications.
The next step is clearly using them to deliver information and branded content — at least for the intrepid few that are able to secure the limited inventory of emojiurls!