Walt Disney latest animated movie’s subject was about emotions a difficult subject to communicate about. We were looking for a way to "dilute" the heaviness of the theme to engage potential movie goers, create expectation and be on their top of mind. We decided to use the 5 movie characters as a fun way to communicate emotions: joy, sadness, anger, disgust and fear would be used as emoticons in chat apps. Our target would spread the message by using our emoticons during their everyday chatting.

With the help of a mobile app startup, we created brand stickers with each of the characters (joy, sadness, anger, disgust and fear) and made them available to use on online messaging, mobile, chat apps, iMessage, Native SMS, Facebook Messengers, WhatsApp, Google Hangouts etc.

People could download the app by visiting Disney’s internet sites, social media and other owned media.

But that is not all, the new technology allowed us to give the App an edge other emoticon apps did not have. Once it the app was downloaded, Inside out stickers were recommended, based on the emotion the text transmitted, in real time. This was possible thanks to an algorithm developed by the startup.

In 2 months with a 10 000€ budget:

The amount of shared of stickers created a snowball effect and allowed the character to be discovered by a larger audience.

Emoticons and Stickers are not perceived as advertising.

Without intruding into people’s privacy with push style advertising, we managed to have the brand’s message spread virally.

• 60% Conversion rate (Facebook ads)

• 80K+ Stickers sent

• 23,5M+ Stickers viewed

• The performance of the movie exceeded all expectation with 4 000 000 Entries in the cinema as of June 17th.