Now Ford is celebrating the debut with an online video narrated by Bryan Cranston and a campaign that cost the automaker upward of $50,000. And while that may be a drop in the bucket for a company the size of Ford—it spends more than $2.5 billion annually on advertising—the amount reveals how emoji have become a ubiquitous marketing tool. Your smartphone’s keyboard is yet another digital platform where brands, businesses, and product segments must compete for attention.

The new emoji, or at least its reference image, is clearly a Ford. It looks to be about the size of a midsize Ford Ranger, but its headlights lean forward like an old F-150. “We kind of tried to make it look like it could be both,” VanDyke said. It also has only one row of seats, even though most new pickups sold today are de facto minivans and have two. “Even most of our pickups are sold as double-cab pickups, but the traditional iconography of pickups is single cab. So we tried to stay true to that,” he said.

Though the pickup-truck proposal was provisionally approved in May, Ford did not publicize its rollout until today, which happens to be World Emoji Day, a very silly five-year-old holiday observed mostly by corporations. The announcement will sate fans such as the actor Dwayne Johnson. The granitic pro wrestler and former Ford pitchman has tweeted half a dozen times about his desire for a pickup emoji. But it also raises questions about who can influence emoji, a set of pictograms used by billions of people around the world everyday.

Read: Emoji don’t mean what they used to

Emoji are overseen by the Unicode Consortium, a 28-year-old technical organization that governs the global standard for computer text. Unicode is ubiquitous: The letters you are reading right now only look like letters because the engineers who made both of our computers agreed to follow the Unicode standard. For most of its existence, the Unicode Consortium was mostly ignored by average computer users, even when it stumbled into controversy.

But in 2007, engineers at Google began working to render emoji—which had previously flourished only on Japanese phones—within the international Unicode standard. It was soon possible to type emoji on both Google- and Apple-made smartphones. By the mid-2010s, the once-sleepy Unicode Consortium found itself in charge of a global phenomenon.

So began the bonanza to make emoji—which had always borne the imprint of their Japanese manufacturing (there were always sushi emoji, and a lot of trains)—look more like the rest of the world. The taco, burrito, and mosque emoji all debuted in 2014. Emoji with black or brown skin followed the next year.

Two years ago, Ford pitched the Unicode Consortium on a pickup-truck emoji. Its proposal was declined. But Ford tried again last summer after working with the marketing firm GTB and the creative agency Blue State, according to VanDyke. That pitch was provisionally approved by Unicode’s emoji subcommittee a few months ago. “But it still has to get a final blessing,” VanDyke said.