Coca-Cola Bought A Bunch Of Web Addresses For Emojis

Moving on from its last ill-fated social media campaign, in which an attempt to spread positivity turned into a lesson about the dangers of leaving your marketing efforts to a robot, Coca-Cola is once again making an effort to make us think of happy things when we think of Coke.

To Coca-Cola Puerto Rico, the latest happy things are smiley face emojis. Their new campaign involves the web address registration for "every emoji that conveys happiness," according to Adweek. Though there's already a caveat — all the newly registered URLs use the .ws suffix, which is meant for Samoa, but leads to a landing page for Coca-Cola Puerto Rico, Emoticoke.com.

"Emojis are not accepted on domains such as .com, .net, and .org," DDB Puerto Rico, a local PR agency, told Adweek. "After doing some research on domains that do accept emojis, we opted to go with the .ws because the letters could stand for 'We smile' and hence seemed most relevant to the brand."

As you may have already guessed, Coke is targeting mobile users, who account for a "vast majority" of their audience, according to Alejandro Gómez, president of Coca-Cola Puerto Rico.

"Since emojis have become a kind of second language for Coke's younger consumers, we felt this was a great opportunity to connect on a deeper level with our most important demographic," said Gómez.

But how many of those users are actually willing to enter a URL with a special character instead of, say, typing "Coke" or "Coca-Cola" into Google? We're not sure, but you can bet Coke is trying to bank on it.