Keep on truckin emoji how to#

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Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. Rock, we are more than open to a follow-up.Ĭopyright © 2021 NPR. At the time of publication, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson has still not responded to multiple requests for comment. They simply didn't want to publicize it until it was a done deal. But Lee says the way Ford subcontracted their proposal to a seeming truck lover without any clear link to the company has led her and others to call for more disclosure of corporate money in emoji.Įric Grenier at Ford says the company did not intentionally obscure their role in gestating the pickup emoji. Lee says plenty of emojis have had corporate backing, from the taco emoji - lobbied for by Taco Bell - to the interracial couple emoji.

It was the first one that really raised the issue of whether or not there should be disclosure about dark money behind emoji. LEE: There were no rules in place about disclosure. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Did you feel like Unicode had been kind of tricked by big truck? UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you've all been waiting for - the truck emoji.īRYAN CRANSTON: You can't put a price on it because it's free. GRENIER: July 17 of 2019, we announced to the world that we were behind the truck emoji. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And no one really did know until. LEE: We were like, maybe he's just a fan of pickup trucks. It was just like a random guy - you know, some guy that just sort of, like, emailed in this proposal and, like. LEE: I remember being really struck by the quality and the statistics. And Lee says when the pickup proposal reached the emoji illuminati, it looked like it was coming from an everyday truck lover. They accept proposals from everyday people and give priority to ideas that demonstrate global demand. And she says, at least in theory, the emoji proposal process is supposed to be meritocratic. Lee is a member of Unicode's Emoji Subcommittee, which vets proposals before they go to the final vote. For example, there are no emoji for celebrities, deities, logos or brands. JENNIFER 8 LEE: Nothing specific about money at this point.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: So is there an official policy about how money is supposed to influence or not influence the approval of emoji? HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Its technical name - the Unicode Consortium, a Silicon Valley nonprofit which administers the library of emoji. GRENIER: One of our truck leads calls it the emoji illuminati. The agency got to work drafting a formal proposal for the mysterious organization vested with the power to decide which emoji ideas live and which ones die. And he thought that if the emoji could look like a Ford F-150, that would be its own form of ambient advertising.

Keep on truckin emoji how to#

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: So Grenier hired an ad agency to figure out how to make that twinkle in the Rock's eye into a reality. GRENIER: I guess the Rock did put us in a hard place, yes (laughter).

Would it be fair to say the Rock put you guys in kind of a hard place? And his posts got enough people hot and bothered that Grenier just couldn't ignore it. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: But the Rock was not wrong. GRENIER: And we started thinking to ourselves, there's got to be a pickup emoji. GRENIER: (Laughter) He had put out an Instagram post that said something - blah, blah, blah, insert nonexistent pickup truck emoji here. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: So where did this whole truck emoji idea begin?ĮRIC GRENIER: We had been doing some work with Dwayne Johnson - you know, the Rock. Here's Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi with our daily economics podcast The Indicator.ĪLEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI, BYLINE: To hear the backstory of this particular emoji, I called up Eric Grenier, who heads up social media for the Ford Motor Company. The story of how that truck got onto our devices is a window into the big and sometimes dark money that companies spend to influence how we communicate. You may not have noticed this on your computer or your cellphone yet, but among the latest batch of new emojis is an unassuming little blue pickup truck.