EMOJIS SCREAM ‘HAIL STATE’

When you’re the director of marketing for a
large sports institution such as Mississippi State University, Starkville,  it’s vastly important to engage athletic fans through different marketing tools.
MSU has done that and more with its customized emoji keyboards that fans download to their smartphones from Apple and Android stores. The keyboards have emojies, stickers and gifs that are shared via text or social media.
When the athletic department launched the marketing tool in 2015, more than 15,000 people downloaded the app on the first day. To date, more than 100,000 fans have downloaded the app, using it leading up to big games and on game day itself.
MSU was the first university in the U.S. to create and launch customized emojis in-house, and the idea stemmed from MSU’s former Athletic Director Scott Stricklin, who saw what the Atlanta Hawks were doing with customized emojis, said MSU Director of Marketing Rhett Hobart.
The emojis give fans the opportunity to text each other or express their excitement about games on social media with emojis and stickers with MSU logos, such as cowbells people send to each other when they’re pumped on game day.
Stickers also were created for the various venues across the campus, allowing fans to text or reach a large audience on social media, telling friends to meet them at the game. College interaction has been phenomenal, said Leah Beasley, associate athletic director of marketing and fan engagement.
“The fans say (to a friend), ‘What are you doing today?’ and they respond with a sticker of the venue,” she said.
Promoting the emoji project was key to its success, Beasley said.
“We promoted across our food vendors, the basketball venue, football venue and baseball venue,” she said. “We also promoted in the venues.  We believe it’s a large part why our marketing team won the National Association of College Marketing Administration award.”
The university reminds fans — both leading up to game day and on game day — to use their emojis and stickers to express excitement and support for their teams.
The use of emojis is especially popular at basketball games, she highlighted.
Initially, the university offered the app downloads for free, but now they charge 99 cents, and the fee goes to pay for the creation and the upkeep of the emojis.
In order to successfully use the stickers and emojis at the stadiums on game days, the stadium has to ensure that fans can successfully use their phones and the internet, which often is problematic for venues across the country which have large volumes of people using the internet and cell data at once.
“Two years ago, we put a cell tower in the stadium and put sensors to help improve the cell singles,” Hobart said. “It’s much improved.”
Perhaps the most profound piece of the emoji platform is the game day interaction, he said.
“We feel a pretty big spike during game day,” Hobart said.
To quantify that, in the first year of use, MSU had a million pieces of content shared with using the emojis and stickers during game days.
The university creates each emoji, sticker and gif in house using Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, giving the athletic marketing department full control of the what kind of hype they want to build for each game.
They also use the emojis to keep fans updated on game days by sending out texts and social media messages about times, scores, and cancellations.
“It’s helping with our brand outreach and our brand equity,” Beasley said.