Huge - Automotive Marketing Campaign of the Year

Company: Huge, Brooklyn NY
Company Description: Huge is a global experience agency providing digital transformation and marketing services to the world's largest businesses and best-known brands. Headquartered in Brooklyn, NY, Huge has more than 1,400 employees working across 12 offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The agency is part of the Interpublic Group of Companies. For more information, visit hugeinc.com
Nomination Category: Marketing Campaign Categories - Industry
Nomination Sub Category: Marketing Campaign of the Year - Automotive - Vehicles

Nomination Title: #ThisIsNotJeep

Specify the date on which this campaign or program was launched: October 17th

In an effort to generate buzz and join the social conversation, brands have co-opted the popularity of emojis since their inception. Emojis have continued to gain popularity and infiltrate every corner of pop culture, leading to many brands begging for their own branded emojis. Jeep had a different problem. Unicode, the global authority on Emojis, had already assigned Jeep its version of an SUV emoji. Which meant, without asking for it, when users entered the word "Jeep" into an iPhone or Android device, the little blue emoji was suggested as a replacement. This emoji didn’t represent the Jeep brand’s adventurous spirit or vehicle capabilities. We saw this as an opportunity to be the first brand to actually give back an emoji while reinforcing the Jeep brand’s spirit with our #ThisIsNotJeep social campaign. We felt obligated to stand up for ourselves and our rabid fanbase by letting the emoji Gods know that no cartoon could ever represent the greatest real-world adventure machine.

Our target audience, Jeep fans on social, are a passionate core of enthusiasts. Social listening proved that our fans were as discontent with the current emoji assigned to the Jeep brand as we were. We knew that if we could partner with them and their passion for the brand, we could take advantage of a cultural moment, generate positive PR for the brand, and ultimately send the rogue emoji packing. We reached out to fans on various social channels with custom, highly sharable content to let them know that we share their distaste for the pathetic, little emoji. We also armed Jeep nation with the hashtag #ThisIsNotJeep as a way to unite us, amplify our collective voice, and drive action. We would not rest until our fans were heard and the imposter emoji that misrepresented Jeep was removed. A few million tweets later, and with the update of Unicode’s 2019 Emoji set, the link between the Jeep brand and the blue SUV emoji was removed.

In the end, Jeep drove off with one of their most successful social initiatives ever by giving back the very thing other brands beg for. Overall, the campaign generated over +280,180,955 PR Impressions, +3, and 381,456MM social media shares. The jeep community celebrated along with major PR news outlets. “Apple drops ‘Jeep’ from emoji search and Jeep fans love it.” —CNN. “Jeep is glad Apple has dropped ‘Jeep’ from emoji search.” —NBC News. “Jeep is liberated from ‘imposter’ emoji and celebrates.” —AdAge.

http://awards-4-jeep.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/