We created a platform that let people create their very own New Zealand holiday itineraries using the world’s truly global social language: emojis.

Using the simple power of emojis, we made it easy for people to create their dream holidays with Air New Zealand. All they needed to do was comment on our Facebook or Twitter posts with a few emojis that best described their perfect New Zealand holiday. The Air New Zealand bot then created their very own Emoji Journey that reflected the emojis they chose.

Each unique Emoji Journey generated a personalised map of New Zealand with specific interest points (activities and destinations which related to the emojis picked) which allowed the user to easily plan their New Zealand adventure. Whether they commented with a 'wave emoji', 'shrimp emoji' or even a 'poo emoji', there was an Emoji Journey for everyone.

We launched Emoji Journey in February 2018, with Facebook video posts in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Japan and Germany. Each video prompted people to comment with the 3 emojis that best described their perfect holiday.

We also ran sponsored Instagram stories, prompting people to swipe to create their own Emoji Journeys. On Twitter we ran a conversational tweet card that allowed people to easily retweet emojis and the hashtag to generate their #EmojiJourney in their feed.

We curated content for each interest point including a description of the place, beautiful images, what other emojis were nearby and which airport each could be explored via.

With minimal media investment, we were relying on the strength of the idea to get people engaging organically. We had paid media of NZD 108,000 for only the first 7 days.

Emoji Journeys was an instant hit, reaching over 1.9 million people in the first 48 hours. Over the total campaign period, over 90,000 emojis were searched creating 31,000 journeys, and got in front of over 9 million people. 30% of reach was organic - well above the 2% platform standard.

People loved the experience of creating their emoji itinerary and paid back that love to Air New Zealand. We saw double the expected engagement rate on our social posts and gained almost 7,000 new followers.

Not only did we get millennials engaging with us, we created future opportunities to connect with them again. Through people creating their personal Emoji Journeys, we grew our retargeting pool to 850,000, well above the average benchmark of 15,000.