Jeremy Burge - Getting into emoji

Thank you... July 17th Grab your emoji It's World Emoji Day We're having a party All around the world, all across the globe Get on a plane and watch the sunset go Doesn't matter who you are Cause everybody uses emoji Everybody uses emoji. Emojis like everybody. Everybody uses emoji. Emojis like everybody. Everybody uses emoji. Emojis like everybody. Party popper fireworks, balloon. Party dressed women, bunny ears. Dancing lady. It's world emoji party. It starts in New Zealand, then spreads across the earth. You are emoji royalty if emoji days the same day as earth. Ride a camel, ride a bullet train, eat a mushroom, kiss a bee. It doesn't matter who you are, everybody uses emoji. Everybody uses emoji. Hello, I'm going to stop that there just because I'm aware that I want you soon. I can't take full credit for that. That was Jonathan Mann, known as Songadayman on YouTube. He sings a song every day and he's done this for seven years now. It's incredible. I don't know how he does it. I'm aware that lunch is next, so I'm going to keep it moving along because, you know, priorities. Quick show of hands. Who has ever used an emoji? Ever. I feel like we're looking 99% or so. It's true. I probably should have. I'm going to ask who has never used an emoji. Has anyone literally never typed an emoji on their phone? Nobody. Literally, I know this side of the room can't see this side and this side can't see that side, so I could lie to you, but nobody in the room has ever been in a situation where they haven't used an emoji. And we've only had it on our phones for five years at the most, unless you're from Japan. So what I want you to do, I want you to grab out your phone right now. Everybody, grab your phones out. Don't start. I want you to open up your notes. Open up your notes app. It could be a messaging app. It doesn't really have to be notes. And look down in this frequently used section. Some phones, I know it's a bit different. Some of them are most recent. Some of them are frequently used. Some of them are mixed. This is actually, I didn't mock this up to make it look like a good selection. They're kind of weird, my most recent ones. I've got two men there, a rainbow, a panda. I think I was testing something. I'm not sure. Anyway, Danish flags. You can tell this is recent. What I want you to do, I want you to type into your notes the most recent five that show up. Down here, most frequently used. Type them in. One, two, three, four, five. And I want you to show the person next to you or anyone around you. Just sort of compare notes. See how similar they are. See if you've got any in common. You should have some in common, but some people do some weird stuff. Yep. Okay. And when you've had a good look, when you've all had a good look, bring your phones back to yourselves. I want you to be looking at your own phone again. And I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you what I think at least one of these should be one of the following. Show of hands if one of your most recent five was one of these. That is, I'm going to say again, 98, 99%. And I'm not psychic. I'm not John Edwards. I'm not talking to your family. They look like this if you're on a Samsung phone. A few of you, I see it's mostly iPhones here. How good is the heart eyes emoji on Samsung? It's all going, whoa. And the crying one as well. That's hilarious. And how do I know this? How do I know that probably one of these was in your most recent five? Emoji tracker. It's a website that monitors real-time emoji use on Twitter. I'm not showing you the animated version. There's an epilepsy warning on there. When you go to the site, if you've ever been there, it literally flashes green. Every time an emoji is posted on Twitter. Which one? So it looks like this. It looks like it's coming right at you. And it gives you a headache in no time. But nonetheless, they're the top five. I merged the two. There's two hearts and they're very similar. So I merged those. So that's global. They're the global most top five emojis used. But it sort of varies as well by country. They're universally what's used. But I did some research on Copenhagen and on the rest of Denmark. Figure out some local... Get some local. Apparently, this... is true. That's from SwiftKey. They do an emoji report every year. Well, they did before they got bought by Microsoft. So that's fun. I guess that makes sense. Here's one. It's also from up here, but not from Denmark. They call this the black moon. It's actually called new moon with face. Every emoji has an official. It's an official name. And it looks like this on a couple of different platforms. Now, Apple's one... It's a bit... All right. So here's the thing. It looks creepy. It's a creepy looking moon. And unfortunately, I don't condone this name, but people call it the molester moon. That is... Because it looks like somebody hiding in the shadows sort of peering out from behind a bush or something. So I don't condone that. And I don't think that's... That's what the Finnish are using it for. But that's what it said. A bit more local here. This is also from SwiftKey. Drugs. Apparently, the Danish... Not into the drug emojis. It's a bit of a stretch putting the mushroom in there too. I don't know how many people use the mushroom referring to drugs, but I'm sure some people do. So apparently, the Danes are very clean and the Portuguese are off the charts. Although, if you look at the scale there, we're talking... This is a tiny fraction. People... They don't use these emojis as much. The ones they like are the faces. People... We love ourselves. We're humans. We like faces. It's been well researched that we just... We like looking at ourselves in the mirror. We like looking at other people. We like selfies. And we like the human faces. These ones. It's the ones... That's what we want to see. The rest of them, they're fun. But really, this is what people... This is what people are using. And on Emojipedia, the top 50 emojis in 2015 were all... Every single one of them was a person, a heart, or a hand gesture. Or to say that, an emoji... You can kind of get there. So, I got here on Tuesday. And I went to this nice cafe. I don't know if anyone local has been there. It's called The Living Room. It was very nice. People on laptops doing some work. I've been there for a while. I had a couple of coffees. I needed to go to the bathroom. And it was a two-story place. I kind of looked around. The staff were a bit busy. So, I didn't want to bottle them. And there was nothing on the top floor. It was clear on the top floor. No toilets up here. Stairs downstairs. So, I went, alright. Go down the stairs. Everybody kind of looks at you when you're walking down these stairs. It's... I'm seeing a few nods down here. But you kind of walk down. You feel like you're walking into the entrance to the ball. Because everybody's just bored on their laptops. And you see like a shining light from the door. So, you're walking down. But you're trying not to be conspicuous. And I'm looking around trying to see a toilet sign. And I don't want to do a lap. I don't want to sort of tiptoe around everybody's laptops looking for it. So, I'm trying to scan it as I walk down the stairs. And there's a dark room over here. So, I think, okay. I go into the dark room. And then at the end of the dark room, there's a corridor. And in the corridor, it sort of looks like this. There's some posters. And there's a white door. And there's another white door. And I think, great. Toilets. And then I think, oh, wait. Maybe they're not. There was no signs on the wall. There was no, there's a little thing down the bottom that looks like a, whether it's vacant or not. Nope. Just a trick. Little piece of metal. So, I'm sitting there going, oh, hang on a minute. Maybe it's the kitchen. Maybe it's a private residence. It was a kind of weird bit of the cafe. So, I do the universal thing. I go fiddle on my phone for a while hoping someone will leave one of these doors if I pretend I'm just busy mashing a dead screen. Thankfully, one of the doors. The guy comes out. I'm like, yes. That's it. So, this moment takes me from this. And then I sort of, sort of happy, you know. But nonetheless, this cringe moment that you've got before you walk in somewhere, you sort of, you want reassurance. You just want a sign. Just a sign. Tell me this is the toilet. This is the men's toilet. And that's what emoji is. It tells you when you send a message to someone and you put the emoji at the end, it tells you, it's reassuring. It tells you what the intent of the message was rather than just a message. The door by itself, terrible. Maybe an extra sign. An extra sign saying, please come in here. Even better. So, emoji is this guy. Just reassuring, going, you're okay. It's cool. You've got the right tone. You understood. Sample message. I made this up. This isn't a real message. But let's say it is. Thanks for helping out. Someone says, sounds good. What happens if over dinner last night when you were helping out, you thought you annoyed the person you're with? You had this niggling thought that you'd said something offensive about their parents or, you know, where they're from or their job. And they send this back and you're thinking, are they mad at me? They said, sounds good. It should be a good thing. But you're still going, I think they're mad at me. I'm pretty sure. No, no, no. So instead, you send this. And they send this back. And you go, okay. Maybe they're not so mad. Well, they send that back. And you're like, yes. It's cool. It's fine. They weren't bothered at all. They're really happy. They've got party girls. They've got a little jazz hands. Meant to be a hug, by the way. That is meant to be a hugging face. But looks like jazz hands. And dinner. So that's great. Emoji has the capability to take you away from being worried about this message for the next day. But it's also a way to make sure that you're not worried about the next week that you've annoyed somebody into making it very clear that that person is happy. This happened to me last week, in fact, whereby I had, sorry, Rachel, my fiancee, if she's on the live stream, I sent her the wrong address for dinner. Completely wrong address. Wrong side of town. She said, where are we going for dinner? Sent her the address. And then just before we were about to get there, I messaged and said, so sorry, wrong address. It's over there. Now, she's a nurse. She works night shift. She was working nights that night. She hadn't had much sleep. And I get this back. And we all know it is not fine if you get that. It is so not fine. And I don't mean this is a gender pejorative to say men, women, if I sent that, anyone. That is not fine. But if you put a thumbs up at the end or a smiley face, then maybe it is fine. The same words get changed context. And we used to use punctuation for this a lot. An exclamation mark there would have... Gone a long way. But no, that was a true representation of how it was. So that's what emoji is. And that's why I think they're endlessly fascinating and important to document. So to flashback just a bit. Emojipedia. This is a site that I started a few years ago. It looks sort of like this. Basically Google for emojis. You can type an emoji in or you can search for something. You can type in beach. And instead of just showing one emoji, it would show the bikini. It would show the swimming person. The wave. It would show the shell. You can try this later on. We've got all kinds of annotations in the background. Making sure that what you search for works. Something we're looking at soon, hopefully to do international, which is a real issue as well. But emojis have English names. So for a universal... People call it a universal language. Linguists yell at me when I say it's a language. So I'm not going to. But it's important to have these tools. Here's an emoji I showed you before. It's called grinning face with smiling eyes. It doesn't look like a grin. But that's its official name. And it has a code. Every emoji has its own code in the background or a code point in the Unicode standard. So that's what we've listed on Emojipedia. We say here's the name. Here's what it looks like. A couple of years later, the first one there is the first release on iOS. Apple updated it. They made it a bit higher res. You can't quite see here, but they got rid of some shading. But then this year they changed it to look like this. Just a month ago. I don't know whether any of you with iPhones, I saw a lot of iPhones, whether you noticed that that emoji has changed into this one. And why? Well, number one, the name. It was confusing before. But really, in a way, who cares what it's called? You care about what it looks like. But the real issue is that's what it looks like on every other phone. So all these years, and a lot of you have probably had this happen, if you sent this emoji trying to cringe and go, yeah, awkward situation, everybody else is getting this, like you're laughing at us. Apple doesn't change their emojis often, but they do sometimes, and we document it. It's really important to have this reference. It's almost a flaw in how it works, but it's inherent to how it works, and somebody needs it to be there to pick up the slack. Here's another one. This is called the astonished face. Until recently, it had Xs as Is on iOS. Looks like this on Samsung. So some of them are problematic. Some emojis look similar on different platforms. Some are problematic. Here's what it looks like on Android, on stock Android. Looks sort of drunk. Here's what it looked like on Android last year. This is Android until a year ago. Very similar. Here's what it looked like on Android three years ago. Seriously, this is what every emoji on Android looked like three years ago. I don't know how this got released, to be honest. But it literally looked like you were sending, like, an alien of everything. Everything was an alien. So people that would get it, and you'd say, sounds great, see you later, alien. Sorry about that, alien. No one was seeing the context of what the alien's doing. They were just seeing the alien. So Google came to their senses and replaced it. So emoji is sort of this weird middle ground where all the vendors have to work together. That, yes, they draw emoji their own way, but if they're too far apart from another one, they ruin the experience for their own users. You get simple ones where it doesn't really matter. You got the cookie. It looks a bit different on HTC phones, Twitter, Windows, Android, Facebook. It doesn't really matter. It's not like someone would go and... Samsung. Yeah. I don't know whether anyone at Samsung has ever used an emoji on another phone before because they do some weird stuff. I just don't know. Are they doing it to be funny? Are they just messing with us, or do they not care? I don't know. This is what my iPhone looked like when I started Emojipedia. Oh, sorry. Am I still on? Yeah. When I started Emojipedia, my iPhone looked like this. It was all white. I'm ashamed to say I didn't even notice at the time that everybody was white. That shows how far, when people talk about white privilege, I literally, until someone brought it up, a good year later, hey, why are all the people white? It hadn't even crossed my mind. Yeah, the smileys were yellow, but these were white. I missed out on this era, which was Japan. These are the Japanese emojis that were in Japan 10 years before we even saw them. I sort of jumped in about here. Just when we were getting... Skin tones was the debate. When I started Emojipedia, it was, why are they white? What should we do about it? And the answer was adding skin tones. The default became yellow, and then you could add different skin tones so that you could have a dark-skinned emoji or a light-skinned emoji. This year, gender is on the agenda. We've got women in the latest iOS update. Every woman that existed has a male version and vice versa. So we get all these that are new. These are all the new women on iOS. And you'll notice they're all the counterparts to existing male emojis. There was a male cop. Now there's a female police officer. There was a man doing a bow, or there was a man doing it being a sleuth or a spy. Rowing, swimming, all the fun stuff were the male emojis, which is bizarre, but Japan. They came from Japan. And by the other way around, these are the new men. So it kind of highlights how ridiculous the gender balance was when you flip it. And you see now that these are the new men emojis, and that's what the women were doing before. They were the females. And nobody... It wasn't really noticed that much. And yet when you put it like this, it's very clear. You go, why are all the men just holding their hands around and doing this, getting their hair cut? So that's been fixed. This is the landscape. When I started Emojipedia in 2013, I was writing and writing, writing articles, documenting things. I thought, this is fascinating. And I was getting this. I was getting nothing. Nobody cared. Nobody was paying attention. I put up a list. It's interesting how this list of new emojis, how there's a slightly frowning face and no really deep frowning face. And everyone, don't care. Not interested. Fast forward to 2016, and a friend sent me this. New emojis come out, and it's literally breaking news. Which I don't want to disparage it. It's what I do. But it still amuses me to no end that this is a real... This is ABC in the US. We introduced to you, sorry to interrupt this program, there are new emojis coming. There is a bacon. There is face palm. There is kiwi fruit. And we bring you this report right now. So, it goes to show you the different world we're in. We are in an emoji world. And there's nothing the media love more than a story about Apple, emoji, and something controversial. And there was this. This year, Apple changed this emoji into this. How cute. How nice. And it's fair to say, America lost their minds. They were mad. I was going to say everybody, but it was really quite isolated to the US. Some people in other countries, they found it amusing. Maybe they thought it was dumb, or counterproductive, or good. Or a good thing, get rid of the guns. But there was so much of this in America. My inbox. Whew. I'm not Apple. I didn't choose to do this. I thought it wasn't the smartest thing to do. I thought it's problematic that now there's a person that sends a toy, a water pistol on iOS. And they send it to Twitter or wherever. And it's now a real weapon. So you could say, I'm going to the park and I'm bringing this. And then a million people are saying, I'm bringing a real gun. And it's funny, but it's crazy that Apple thought this was a good thing to do. I understand the motivation, but it's problematic. But nonetheless, here it is. Apple replaces water gun. We're back on the cable news. I like this because this is CNN doing Emojipedia live on the air. This is what we've been doing for years. We've got the name. We've got the code point. We show what it looks like on every platform. And this is literally CNN being Emojipedia on air a couple of years later. So I thought that was great. I hope they had somebody good to discuss this. Oh, no. Taking it very seriously, as you can see. I was going to wear a shirt, but I thought I don't really wear, I don't wear like a shirt with a tie. I didn't really do that. So I thought, no, no, I'll just wear my Mac icon shirt. And I'm in the CNN office and everyone's all there in their ties and their briefcases. And I think they wondered who had walked in. But anyway, it was fun. The host there afterwards, as soon as we went off air, she was like, oh, that was great. We always discuss such boring things. So that was a nice little break. So it's fair to say, emojis, they're taking over the world. They're everywhere. This is something that Instagram put together showing their emoji use. This is only showing up from 2010 to 2015, shooting through the roof in a number of posts on Instagram that include emojis. They did this little graph. Check it out later on. It's a nice little map of which emojis are grouped together and which posts. You can sort of see the faces are all together. I love that the monkeys are grouped as faces because they are. They're the emotions. But I quite like that. World Emoji Day, we saw earlier. It's something I started a couple of years ago. I just thought there should be a day to celebrate emoji. Different companies do fun things. This is what the British Museum put together. They put together a campaign to get people to come and see some of their art. There's the great wave that Apple has made their wave emoji look like this famous tile work from Japan. And they have the real thing at the British Museum. Same with these Easter Island statues. Pepsi, they have these Pepsi bottles for it. Happy World Emoji Day. July 17th is the best day of the year. Day is the best. Because of what day it is. An influx of emojis. Yes, OMG. What day is it? I'll let you say it. If you can do it without words, that'd be great. So if you're watching this on July 17th, it's the day of the world emoji day. Yes. It is world emoji day. Today is world emoji day. It's world emoji day. Emoji day. Emoji day. World emoji day. No choice to celebrate those fireworks we use to express our emotions. I think it is world emoji day after all. World emoji day. Time to say happy world emoji day. Hashtag world emoji day. Happy World Emoji Day. How long have I been on Jesus 2 dancing girls? Still an hour and 5 minutes to go. So if you want to send out those emojis, Andy doesn't know what they are. I'm going to have to reorganize my whole day on how I'm going to celebrate. Yeah, it's good fun. Everyone gets involved. This is what the tweets were. I made the mistake. Again, the first year nobody cared. The second year, it was just through the roof. I made the mistake of not getting anyone else to help with the Twitter or anything. I'm sitting there watching a tweet come in, come in, a tweet come in, a tweet come in, and then suddenly every minute there's 200 tweets flying in. Too much, too much. So you see a lot of stuff that people are doing with emoji, and there's good and there's bad. Some brands sort of get accused of jumping on the bandwagon, which can happen. This was terrible. Just appalling trying to, someone says, oh, emoji's cool. Can we do something about emoji on the Twitter? Don't do this. People didn't like it. No. Like, there's a time and a place. So yes, emojis are fun, and yes, we can use them, but yeah, don't do that. Don't be Hillary in that context anyway. Does anyone know who this guy is? I saw we had a few Snapchat hands earlier. One, couple, yeah. Oh yeah, pretty good, pretty good. For those who don't know, his name is DJ Khaled. He is the most popular man on Snapchat. Here he is. He's unsuspecting. I thought it was a joke or parody account when I first joined Snapchat, I'll be honest. They never said winning was easy. Some people can't handle success. I can. I know what it comes with. Some people can't handle it. I can. The ladies always say, Khaled, you smell good. I use no cologne. Cocoa butter is the key. Cocoa butter is the key. Beautiful day. Every chance I get, I water the plants. Lion, king of the jungle. Succeed, you must believe. Life is what you make it. So let's make it. Bless up. Egg whites, turkey sausage, wheat toast, water. Of course they don't want us to eat breakfast. So we're going to enjoy our breakfast. I mean, I don't know. This is me every time I tune in. I don't know what I'm watching. I love that he's a positive force in the world. He says nice things. There's so much negativity, but what is that? You noticed at the end he said they, that's his motive. He says they don't want you to succeed. They don't want you to have this. They don't want you to have breakfast. So we will have breakfast. That's sort of his go-to, but there's one phrase that he uses a lot. He uses this phrase all the time. The key to more success is using the right soul. I only use God. A major key, never panic. Don't panic. When it gets crazy and rough, don't panic. Stay calm. In life, you have to take the trash out. Trash in your life, take it out. Throw it away. Get rid of it. Major key, take the trash. I don't know whether you caught this, but the phrase that he used every time, it's still there on screen, major key. That's his thing. Taking the trash out, major key. He drops this every time he wants to say something. It tells you that it's important. Major key alert. I'm about to tell you something. Kim's coming on my Snapchat. Major key. He ended up calling, his album out on this. He's a music producer. And really, as much as we laugh and it's hilarious and I still don't quite get it, the whole thing, he's owned the key emoji effectively. He has, you see the key on Twitter. It's normally about him. People don't have to say his name. They see the key and they think of him. True story. The reason I came across DJ Khaled in the first place, I had no idea who he was. I was a pretty mediocre Snapchat user. I was on Emojipedia looking at our analytics and key emoji shot through the roof last December. And I went, what is going on? Why is the key emoji? It was always in the very bottom emoji tracker, bottom quadrant down there. But he's owned it. He uses it everywhere. And he's a music producer. He didn't use the literally, didn't use the microphone with the song. He didn't use the CD. He just came up with the phrase. He says it every time. And that's his. And I think it'd be today to not pick an emoji for your brand or your company to use. It doesn't have to be literal. It could just, it can be any of them. Use it enough and people start to associate that emoji with you. And that to me seems so much more logical and more consistent with how people use it than Hillary Clinton give me three emojis about debt. It's 1851 emojis at the moment. The number's a bit complicated to go into, but that's the current tally. And there's heaps of them. Just pick one and use it. You can put them in text fields. You can put them in Twitter. You can put them anywhere there's text. And as much as I don't need to be here telling you, oh, use emoji everybody. I think it's really clever the way that DJ Khaled has actually taken a generic emoji that's not popular and really made it his own. One thing not to do though, don't take someone else's. This is MasterCard trying to get in, trying to do their own thing with major key. Again, no. Nobody wants brands stomping on other people's things. Just come up with your own thing. It just looks silly and desperate when you jump on what someone else is doing. But you don't have to. You can do fun things. Coke registered this domain name. Emojis do work in domains, but only these WS and a couple of other obscure ones. So they registered this and redirected to Coca-Cola. Norwegian Airlines, they registered this. It's a great website. I'm not a copyright lawyer, but there's weird things with can you use them for this or that. Generally, yes. But if you are concerned, these are completely free. There's one from Twitter and one from a company called EmojiOne. They're completely free emoji sets that you can use for anything as opposed to Apple's ones, which are probably fine. But every now and then you get big production companies. They'll email me and they'll say, can we use this on our TV? And I'll show all of Apple's emojis. And I go, I don't know. You'd have to contact Apple and they don't get back to anybody. So pick one. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. But just pick one. They're fun. They're amusing. They make you smile. You see this and you go, you just smile. That doesn't mean anything. These are just colorful emojis. Sprinkle them in what you do. And you'd be surprised at how much just thinking creatively. Don't just use emoji like my grandma and say, oh, I'm visiting my friends with their baby today, baby emoji. And I love the trees that tree. Tree emoji. Think outside the box. Be creative. And before I go, there's a look at the new emojis coming out this year. If you're on an Android phone, you'd have already got a version of these. But iOS does not have them yet, but they have been approved. You'd have probably seen news about it before. There's 72 new emojis if you're watching American Cable TV. Here they are. This is what's coming up this year. These are our mock-ups, I should say. We design mock-ups of the new emojis that are approved in Apple style, to give you an idea. So I was going to have a bit of time for some Q&A, but I think we might be cutting it a bit fine. So there's a design salon I'm speaking at later. We're going to talk about the emoji competition later. And thank you for having me and come up and chat if you would like to.