No one looks at web banners anymore. 94% of us skip pre-roll video ads. Makes me think maybe we  became numb to any form of advertising.

Social media allows marketers to get more personal with viewers, thanks to the level of insight into the users social activity these channels can offer, along with their services like snapchat filters, sponsored tweets and promoted Instagram ads. 

Take that a step further and your messages will soon be invaded too. What? You heard that right,  WhatsApp has already tested limited corporate promotions, and Facebook Messenger has unveiled branded chatbots: you can ask 1-800-Flowers for bouquet recommendations, for example, and order flowers without leaving the exchange. Google began rolling out click-to-message ads, which prompt customers to open pre-written text messages through ads viewed on mobile browsers.

The prospect of seeing advertising in a space we use to talk to our friends and relatives might sound dismaying.

But one startup sees this as the future of advertising, Emogi already raised $4 million and wants to make you like the ads in your messages so much that you won’t mind that they are trying to sell you things.

Emogi recently launched a branded-emoji platform, called Wink, Wink looks like the standard emoji keyboard that comes with any smartphone, but it’s loaded with a changing array of branded emoji, which pop up above the regular keyboard depending on what a user types. It’ll work like this: A beer brand—let’s say Bud Light—makes an ad buy on the triggers “party,” “drinks,” or “.” The brand then targets the users in the demographic they’re going after: women aged eighteen to thirty-five in New York or Chicago, say, whose Internet profiles indicate that they’ve recently searched for local bars. When these women text their friends “?,” a selection of Bud Light emoji will pop up in their keyboards: a girl riding a beer can like a rocket, perhaps, or a frog sipping a Bud Light, or aclutching a beer in both hands. Ideally, these little images will be too charming to resist.

So while brands keep asking how do we get more traction on social media, Emogi is trying to persuade them to adapt into this new space.

Wink won’t record text messages, but it will record data around the triggers that provoke branded emoji, and match that data to the information attached to your device I.D.—your location, your Internet profile, the number of devices you’re in communication with. As a service to the brands, it will quantify all of this in real time.“You kind of get an understanding of the types of emotions people are having throughout the day. . . . Like, if a person is sending a heart at a particular moment, you have a geolocation, you have all these other things, you know that at that moment in time this person was excited or they were thinking about coffee at this place,” CEO  said with visible excitement. “Wink is just a key for brands to get in the door. We’re going to give them more things as they walk through. We’re going to figure out all the ways they can leverage the data.”