There was a time when the American flag, rendered in pixels, seemed like a reasonable thing to put in a marketing email. That time, it appears, has passed.
A new study from Jacquard, a company that analyzes email marketing language, has found that brands are 25 times more likely to use patriotic language in their campaigns than they were a decade ago — but almost entirely unwilling to include the flag emoji in their subject lines. Out of 368,000 emails examined, the Stars and Stripes appeared fewer than 10 times. The Statue of Liberty managed five.
"It's a more loaded symbol than a Christmas tree," said Toby Coulthard, Jacquard's chief product and growth officer, "and in the current climate, brands may be making an instinctive calculation that it's not worth it."
(What, you were expecting the ads to say, "Against America"?)
The study, which tracked email campaigns around Independence Day, Memorial Day and Labor Day, found that the period from June 25 through July 7 now accounts for nearly 60 percent of all patriotic language in marketing — a commercial annexation of the holiday that Mr. Coulthard described as "the Black Friday-ification of Independence Day." The 250th anniversary of American independence next year, he said, will only accelerate the trend.
But if the volume of red-white-and-blue rhetoric has surged, its character has remained notably cautious. References to barbecues, fireworks and "the backyard" far outpaced anything touching on political ideology. Brands, it seems, want to sell hot dogs, not take sides.
"Defaulting to transactional language is the path of least resistance," said Ariela Nerubay Turndorf, an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California and chief brand officer at Walker Advertising.
The largest single-year increase — 116 percent — occurred between 2024 and 2025, a jump that Mr. Coulthard attributed less to any one election than to years of planning around next year's semiquincentennial. The flag, in other words, is good for business. The emoji, apparently, is not.
Original story published in campaignlive.com: "Against a mixed political backdrop, patriotic marketing is booming | Campaign US"