TAP Portugal - Fly Moji

TAP Portugal - Fly Moji

Emoji’s are everywhere. These tiny, conventionalized pictures have moved beyond a simple thumbs up, heart, or smiley face to express increasingly complex thoughts and ideas, replacing even full sentences for advanced users.

So prevalent is this communication trend that he word “Emoji” was selected as 2015 Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionary, and experts are still in a hot debate over whether Emojis could one day be classified as a language.

While staying out of the academic debate, TAP Portugal has nonetheless adapted the Emjoi trend to generate buzz with a lighthearted campaign called TAP FlyMoji .

In December, TAP Portugal (currently undergoing a privatization programme and network restructure) created a free, Emoji keyboard app available for download on iTunes and Google Play.

The FlyMoji app contains more than 100 illustrated Emoji’s that probably won’t replace another language, but that people can certainly use to add colour to text conversations – especially if they’re chatting about air travel, the holidays, TAP or Portugal itself (i.e. cities, food and culture).

Aviation Emojis on the app include TAP cabin crew of different genders and ethnicities, crew uniform elements, TAP aircraft exteriors from different perspectives, inflight meals, boarding passes and more. Holiday images include a plane in a Santa hat and St. Nicholas himself having a snooze in a lie-flat aircraft seat.

The airline also created a microsite where people could create Christmas post cards with a customizable TAP crew member, Christmas background and personal message.

On December 6th TAP used the Nasdaq Global Newswire to distribute a release about the FlyMoji app and also published a short video Tweet and a Facebook post, though likes and re-tweets were low – possibly due to poor timing in the busy Holiday season.

As of January 2, 2017, there were still no reviews of the app on iTunes, yet Google Play shows it at 4.4 out of a possible five. We downloaded the iPhone app found activation with iMessage was somewhat tricky. This possibly explains why on December 23rd the airline posted an activation tutorial video on its YouTube channel and subsequently tweeted the video several times. It could also explain why uptake and positive feedback/activity appears weaker than probably anticipated.

Airway Magazine , a title popular with aviation enthusiasts, picked up the news and published this article, which revealed that a creative contest would soon be held with winners designing the next crop of TAP FlyMoji’s.