Finland, land of the midnight sun, saunas, black metal, and phones that were once cool, is now also the land of emoji. The Nordic country is the first in the world to release a set of government-approved emoji stickers.
Working with Nokia, Finland distilled its essence down to 30 emoji that it will roll out over the next month. You can get the first three—a naked couple in a sauna, a spiked-leather-wearing headbanger, and, of course, a Nokia phone now. They’re awesome, and pretty damn Finnish.
Finland says it's the first country to do this, and, as a marketing scheme, it was only a matter of time before governments embraced emoji. Unlike a flag, which wraps its symbolism into an abstracted visuals, these emoji communicate national pride in the most literal way possible. And directly to our phones, no less.
You get the sense that Finland is having some fun with this. And indeed, according to Petra Theman, Director for Public Diplomacy at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, they're meant to be tongue-in-cheek. “We have been anything but serious when creating these emojis. Hopefully they will open up not only our weirdness but also our strengths of which unarming honesty is one example,” he says.
Let's hope other countries follow suit. I wouldn't mind finding out what a disarmingly honest emoji might look like coming from the United States.
