There are around 5 billion emoji sent every day of just about everything you can imagine. Despite this, there was one emoji missing. One a growing amount of Tinder users could identify with; the interracial couple emoji. If an interracial couple wanted to represent their love online, their only option was a yellow couple - considered by most to mean ‘white’. As an app that has fostered the meeting of more interracial couples than ever before, Tinder wanted to reinvent the language of love in the digital age once again.

So we launched #representlove, a global campaign petitioning Unicode to add the interracial couple emoji to the official consortium. This was more important than any emoji petition that has come before as it spoke to the very heart of our culture. What’s more important, an emoji for a taco or one that stands for love in all it’s forms?

Our campaign launched in the US with media exclusives announcing the petition. On the same day, we launched a social film across Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube. In the film, emoji replaced real-world objects, but our interracial couple were left with nothing to represent them.

To drive signatures, we launched our social activation on Twitter and Instagram, beginning with influencer activity across 7 markets. We wanted to demonstrate how simple it could be to represent everyone. We asked real couples to post a photo using #representlove. In response, our teams of designers and community managers replied in real-time with an emoji that had been completely customised to match their image.

As the campaign grew, debate quickly fired up. As a brand that champions diversity, Tinder had a responsibility to reply. We created individual responses to the trolls, also reminding the victims of racist online attacks that they had our support.

Our campaign generated –

1.7 billion media impressions (Objective: 300 million)

5.2 million video views (Objective: 2.4 million)

We reached 17.3 million people on social with #representlove. (Objective: 8 million)

We smashed our petition goal amassing 44,000 signatures and counting on change.org. (Objective: 30,000)

Unicode has agreed to hear a presentation to their board in 2018.

We had 216 pieces of global coverage; CNN, Buzzfeed, USA Today, Vogue and The Independent. Quality of the coverage is overwhelmingly positive. HuffPost said ‘Tinder is continuing to invest in social issues’, Marie Claire remarked that ‘[With #representlove] Tinder gives everyone the right to express themselves’.

With #representlove we used social to mobilise our key demographic in the fight for the interracial couple emoji. Our petition became the most successful emoji petition of all time on change.org.  Tinder is now planning to meet with the Unicode board to make interracial couple emoji a reality.