• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, March 9, 2016

Guinness is covering all of its media bases for its biggest day of the year.

Leading up to this year’s St. Patrick’s Day, the iconic Irish stout brand is running both a social effort and a custom holiday TV spot/video.

For the social media campaign, Guinness posted an open letter on Thrillist to “Dark Beer Lovers of the World.” 

The letter urges dark beer fans to help Guinness lobby the Unicode Consortium—the official body that coordinates international computer standards, including emojis—to release a dark beer emoji, to supplement the existing standard golden beer emoji. 

The brand has dubbed the desired new emoji a “stoutmoji.”

The letter asks fans to use a specific tweet (“I want more beer variety on my keyboard. Add a #DarkBeer emoji, @Unicode. #Stoutmoji”)—in support of a stoutmoji proposal that Guinness sent to the consortium.

The introductory copy above the letter on Thrillist, posted on March 8, notes in part: “As of this writing, the ‘beer’ emoji has been used 5,018,563 times... just on Twitter. So what's wrong with that?...This emoji that represents all of the delicious rainbow of brews is clearly a pale iteration, and Guinness is not happy about it…”

Guinness is offering the link to the Thrillist letter, and a promotional GIF, on its U.S. Twitter page. The GIF asks, “Isn’t there more to beer than this?” (showing the pale beer emoji), and declares “It’s time for this” (a dark beer image). 

Guinness’s dedicated St. Patrick’s Day TV spot/video—which debuted on “Comedy Central” on March 1, and is also now posted on the brand’s YouTube channel—features Guinness brewers at St. James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin.

The brewers talk about what St. Patrick’s Day means to them and to Guinness, and ask fellow beer lovers to drink responsibly on the holiday—or in their words, “Take it slow, drink like a brewer.”