• by Aaron Baar , December 2, 2014

AT&T is bringing holiday music into the 21st century, by adding a little fun, personality and visual language to the season’s well-known traditional carols.

The telecom has launched an “Emoji Carols” creator, enabling consumers to create animated versions of their favorite holiday songs using expression symbols (smiley faces, Santas, trees, rocket ships, etc.) in place of words.

“The holidays aren’t about what you get. [They’re] about what you did and shared,” Valerie Vargas, AT&T’s vice president of advertising and marketing communications, tells Marketing Daily about the effort. “It's the traditions that are best remembered. We decided to take emojis to the tradition of caroling.”

The Emoji Carol creator enables users to create their own personalized emoji, and animate six different songs (ranging from “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” to “The Dreidel Song”) word-by-word, using both their personalized symbol and a large number of other emoji (such as families, hand gestures, bells and pretty much every gift given during the 12 days of Christmas). Once completed, the songs can be shared via e-mail and social networks to increase, Vargas says. “That application of music plus emojis is inherently sharable,” Vargas says.

While the carols created by consumers tend to run less than a minute, AT&T (in conjunction with agency BBDO in New York and Atlanta) collaborated with emoji editor Jesse Hill to create longer versions of the animated song. Hill also had a hand in creating the customized emoji for the consumer animations, Vargas says. 

AT&T’s “emojified” carols will be promoted through December via social media, pre-roll video and through a content partnership with BuzzFeed, according to Vargas.