You’re going to get a kick out of this. MilkPEP, funded by the nation’s dairy processors, has launced a new campaign to reach teens through the very popular medium of text messaging. The smiley 🙂 gets a milk mustache! :-{)

If you don’t know, those are examples of emoticons that are used in the electronic world to help express emotion, especially in emails and text messages, where the meaning behind your words isn’t always obvious. They were created in 1982 by Scott E. Fahlman. Make sure you use this one proudly! :-{)

“It’s really about new ways to reach our teen target audience,” said Victor Zaborsky, director of marketing for MilkPEP. “They don’t watch as much TV and they don’t ready as many magazines. The Internet is where they live and breathe.” The new emoticon is one of the few associated with a specific brand or trademark.

To encourage the use of the new symbol, MilkPEP appended the series of typographic characters to online title of a video the group posted to YouTube featuring NBA star Vince Carter, who stars in milk ads. The group also employed the milk-mustache emoticon in e-mail alerts sent to its 20,000 MySpace “friends.”