In
Digital Marketing, many tools have appeared since the last decade, if some of
these tools were complex there is one who suggest a particular interest from
the usual consumer to companies: the GIF. The technique isn’t new but with
emergence of social media, the gif has made itself a reputation: mostly being
attractive, easy to find and with a sense of humor very appreciated sometimes.
It follows and evolves with the now famous « emoji’s », and bring
something very special to the conversation not only for people when they are
chatting, but also for companies when they try to implement it in ad campaign
of in their communication in general.
1. Gens Y & X: second creator of the GIFs
The
GIF means « Graphic Interchange Format », created in 1987, which is a
surprise as it is very known now for less than 10 years. Here you can have a
great pictured history/timeline of the GIF.
His creator, Steve Wilhite has realized a way to do a specific kind of
animation, taking few images, without sound and played in loop mode. The GIF
hasn’t so popular as told before, indeed there was a time when using it in
conversations makes you tacky. This can explain because of the period, before
social networks explosion and in a fast paced evolving environment, which was
internet during the 90’s. Another aspect was the resource, display a gif back
in the days took way too long, now it demands less than a second to charge and
play the loop. Facing the overall evolution of the web and its design, the GIF,
poor of design and a getting older with no evolution, were cast aside.
Nowadays,
on Facebook Messenger, there are, for the most part, images from movies or TV
Shows. It exists two kinds of GIFs, the classic one and the one with a text
within, the « GIF caption ». Putting a few words on the expressions
produces often a funnier effect. The GIF is also appreciated for its easiness
to be transportable, because you can now easily charge them on your mobile
phone through the chat apps. It come close with the fact that typing become
more and more boring, especially on mobile phone and portable device, our
generation need to speak fast and express themselves more and more in a way
emotions are felt by the person who read the message.
According to Giphy’s CEO, Alex Chung, and the famous sentence: a picture may be worth a thousand words, and if you consider “the average
GIF contains sixty frames, then they’re capable of conveying 60,000
words »
Simon Gibson head of marketing and
acquisitions at Giphy said: « If you pull content from the culture,
and it is used to express
themselves, it opens a bigger variety of broader and abstract thoughts »
Speaking
of Giphy, this company, which has raised more than $23 million, is one of the
leader of the middle, both turned on web users and companies, as this first GIF
search engine has provided people a huge GIF library, very funny for the user,
and sometimes containing implicit advertisement for companies by generating
their brands into GIFs. The company Giphy has known a exponential success, they
actually registered that there was 95 millions of unique users per month in
2015. Moreover, Giphy announce there are currently around 150 million
original GIFs, while the NY Times tried to collect the
number of GIFs on the most popular social networks:
▪ 23 million GIFs are posted to Tumblr every day
▪ Five million GIFs are
exchanged on Facebook Messenger daily
▪ More than two million
GIF interactions take place on Slack monthly
The
best to sum up this part is what Maxime Antoine, creator of the company .GIF :
« Generation
Y was born with computers, we are the first consumer social networks and other
means of communications. As soon as it is possible to communicate differently,
more original way than the others, we do. The gif, between image and video,
enjoys an unlimited choice on canvas, (...). In animation, it summarizes what
would have taken many lines to write. It's fun and it fits well with the
generation Y, (...) who wants above all to have fun, share, have fun, do not
take the lead and, in this, the GIF is a good way of expression "
2. GIF for Business
GIF
are very used in companies’ content marketing. It shows to consumers and
potential targets that the firm is well settled in the actual Web culture and
that it understands the stakes and be able to communicate in every way to make
consumers feeling close of the company and the brand’s values. In digital
content marketing GIFs are a strong way to communicate, first because of the
fact the consumer’s eye is grabbed easier and that the repetition offers him to
not do anything except enjoying the GIF. The user can start seeing the GIF from
the middle of it, and miss anything, as it starts over few seconds later, and
again etc. Furthermore, it speaks the internet language, which sometimes is
something that you cannot reproduces is real people exchanges. Besides, it is
very easy to consume it and enhance easily brand’s messages from companies.
To
a financial aspect for them, GIFs are great, as they are more effective than
images and cheaper than a video. Companies like Riffsy and Giphy, said they
were not currently focused on making money from the animations, they are
working with brands on using clips to promote products. Moreover, the company
doesn’t risk to overcharge its website, the GIF is a light weight format,
unless you abuse of it on the same webpage. By the way, doing this would produce
the opposite of the requested effect: instead of attracting the consumer’s
attention, you would make consumers’ eyes run from the screen, as he would
escape all these « epileptic colors » and animations.
“Typing is an antiquated input method and you
can’t express emotional dimension adequately with just a handful of emoji,”
said Adam Leibsohn, the chief operating officer of Giphy, which is based in
Manhattan. “GIFs have trumped all of it.”. Besides you can add the fact that
the huge easiness to share the GIF is interesting for companies, who tries to
make them viral over the internet and social networks. They also use it in their
email campaigns to bring an innovation to the simple newsletter or promotion
you receive. On social media like twitter they create also GIF to react to
current events happening on today’s consumption society, it shows they are able
to react quickly and are close to the consumer by interacting with him easily.
Reuters
has said that some predict that 84% of communication will be visual by
2018, so any type of visual content that may help a brand find its
personality is more than welcome.
Examples:
- The movie Taken 3. One popularclip showed Mr. Neeson jumping out a window, on repeat, with the subtitle “YOLO” — shorthand for “you only live once” — in blocky white lettering.
- Nintendo announced its collaboration with Vans through Tumblr and this GIF was the perfect way to summarize the announcement:
- Netflix has created an outdoor ad campaign entirely made with GIFs
- Sosh(Orange telecommunication) and Konbini have played the card to be “cool” and funny with funny and interactive GIFs
- Nutella made subtle advertisement with that GIF :
Another
kind of business: the digital art, here is an example of a person who live with
his GIF creation: the Tumblr of A.L. Crego, it opens the question that the GIF can be
something else than a funny stuff you send to friends.
To
conclude, it exists a debate on the pronunciation of the word GIF. Some people
think it is a hard G because it means “Graphics”, but in an interview with the NY Times, Mr Wilhite said: “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both
pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of
story.
Update from November 1st : Giphy has been valuated for 600 millions of dollars. More details here.
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