GIFs Are Ads, and How People Interact With Them with Giphy | Behind the Numbers
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Want to reach your customers where they're already talking? Where else, Marcus? It's the perfect place. I agree. Listen up. Over the past 10 years, Giphy has built a platform used daily by millions. Everywhere conversations are happening. And now Giphy Ads helps brands connect with their audiences through ads people share, not just look at. For more, head to ads.giphy.com and hit the get started button today. That's ads.giphy.com.

Hey gang, it's Friday, May 30th. Emi, Jeremy, Alix, and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, an eMarketer video podcast made possible by Giphy. I'm Marcus, and today we'll be discussing how people use GIFs and the best ones for brands to use. Join me for that conversation. We have...

We people, we start with one of our analysts living in New York. It's Emmy Lederman. Hi, thanks for having me. Hello there, of course. We also have with us our Senior Director of Briefings also in New York City, Jeremy Goldman. Hey there, and happy National Creativity Day. That's a real thing.

None of these are real, Alix. Jeremy does this. You can Google it. It's real. That's why we have Giphy, because of creativity. Also joining us, the VP of Client Solutions for Giphy. Living in LA, it's Alix McAlpine. Hello, thanks for having me and happy National Day of Creativity. No, don't join in. Makes it worse. Please don't encourage it. We start with a speed intro to get to know our guests a little better whenever we have someone external on.

So 60 seconds on the clock, which we won't pay any attention to. Let's do it. Alix, what do you do in a sentence?

In a long run-on sentence, I head the client solutions arm of the Giphy ad department. And that means I oversee several teams and I'm in charge of operations, strategy and creative at Giphy ads. And what we do is help brands connect to audiences one GIF at a time. Okay. And in the spirit of creative, second question, what is your favorite piece of art? This is an impossible question. We have to acknowledge that, right, Marcus? Yes.

Do you have a top 10? I have favorite artists. Oh, okay. So there's some contemporary artists that I love and that I have

I have prints or I've purchased some of their paintings. Matthew Palladino out of SF, he makes these like amazing cactus illustrations. I think he lives in Bolivia now. Incredible stuff. Paul Wackers, a painter out of New York. And then I'm a huge fan of some of the people we've worked on GIFs with at Giphy, one of my old colleagues, Parker Jackson.

He makes these like incredibly spooky drawings. He made awesome gifts. He's got incredible range. Love a good painter is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. Okay. Very nice. I asked Emmy this ahead of time. She said, I hate art, Marcus. I didn't say I hate art. Isn't that what you said? I said that. Like sometimes when someone says, what's your favorite, like fill in the blank, it's

It's just you suddenly have not heard of a single thing in that category, which is exactly what happened to me. So I can't think of a work of art. I love Kusama. And then my second answer is anything my nephew makes for me at school is my favorite work of art. Nice.

That is the best answer. Jeremy, mate, I'm so sorry you've got to follow that. And Jeremy has kids. No, that's not fair. Pick a favorite. Well, okay. Like people who are dead, I would say Vermeer has like a lot of really good stuff. I'm married to an art historian. I don't love art. I think it's like art. Do we need it really? But in all seriousness, my brother-in-law Darren Sears is a big fan.

cartographer slash painter person and I have his art behind me whenever I do TV from home and everybody says you were okay but that's really good art so I think that he has to get a mention very nice I was looking up the most expensive painting ever sold at auction do we know this Damien Hirst Da Vinci's Salvatore Mundi savior of the world well this 2017 so you might be right Alex

there's a good chance this is wrong um but some art historians and critics question its authenticity and the extent of his involvement so maybe this doesn't count so that's a good guess however the most expensive the most highest valued painting in the world is a more obvious one mona lisa the mona lisa indeed oh lisa valued at close to a billion dollars that's too much we've seen it right

I've never seen it. Do I need to see it? No, you don't. It's fine. I saw a GIF of it once and I feel like that was fun. Yeah, I saw it on Giphy, so I think I'm good. Good pivot. Alix, did you see it? I've seen it. I grew up in Paris, so I spent a lot of time at the Louvre. That is a flex. I'm sorry. As a French person, I have to mention it. What did you think? Smaller than you expect. Exactly. Rubbish. It was okay from a distance. Anyway, today's real topic, why GIFs are ads and how people interact with them.

All right, folks. Graphics interchange format is something that no one has ever heard of, but you'll be hard pressed to find someone who didn't know its acronym, GIF. Credit for the invention goes to Steve Wilhite. He was working at CompuServe in 1987 and came up with them as a way to efficiently transmit color images over slow internet connections using a compression algorithm.

They started as still images, but new editing software like Photoshop also made it easier to transform the GIF from a collection of still images to a looped video. Notice the 2017 Vox article from Asia Romano. Fast forward to 2013 and Giphy was born. But Alix, what does Giphy do?

What does Giphy do? Broadly, we're a search engine for GIFs. That's where the idea came from, is helping people find these GIFs that they were using in other places online. And we like to say, chances are, if you see a GIF button somewhere where you're able to search in all these thousands of apps online,

chances are it's fired by Giphy and on the back end we have a lot of teams that work with brands but that's what I do but also partners with sports leagues artists entertainment studios etc to make sure that we always have kind of fresh cool gifts to help satisfy people's needs and when we were talking a bit before the recording you'd said that

the user behavior, how people use GIFs is quite interesting and also has changed somewhat. So what are some trends on how people are communicating at the moment, how they used to? How is GIF user behavior changing or changed? Yeah, broadly, you'll see a lot of the same kind of

if you want to encompass it, it's all kind of self-expression. So you see a lot of reactions, emotions, kind of quick phrases and greetings and anything that you might say in a workplace. I think a lot of people use Giphy on Teams, on Slack, in the workplace, in emails.

But what I think I mentioned in our previous conversation is that you'll see it evolve also with what's happening in pop culture or what's happening that day. So there's a lot of conversations about, I called it, I think, the passage of time. So TGIF, people love to celebrate the weekend. People always talk about the weather, but also kind of what's going on broadly in sports. For example, I looked up the Knicks.

up 500% in search this week because people are very, very excited over in New York about the Knicks. And we can also see it evolve as language evolves. So we know that language is evolving kind of as part of life. But if you see language change or new pieces of slang kind of surface in other places online or in conversations, chances are people are also going to be looking to express that phrase or that word, that sentence in GIF form. So I looked...

a little bit on a piece of slang that I could think of that I've seen surface and crashing out.

Really spiking, crash out and crashing out, which are things I see people talk about on TikTok. That's up. It spiked last month. And then something like Aura. I don't know if you've noticed people talking about Aura. That spiked last September. But we can all see, I don't know, it can be anything. But I think it moves with culture and it moves with what's happening in the moment, what people are talking about.

I know none of these words. Sorry, go on, Jeremy. I was going to say, I feel like it's really interesting to be able to, like, that search bar in those interfaces, just to be sitting on all of that data that gives you some contextual cues as to what that person is thinking and experiencing in that moment. That can be really powerful in a way that I hadn't really thought about so much before. Definitely.

we can also see kind of what people care about in in pop culture what's popular for for example

There are memes that surface. I think we've all had that moment where you're like, oh, something happens on your TV or in a movie and you're like, oh, that would make an amazing meme. Kind of the Beyonce reaction at the Grammys this year when she won, I think it was Album of the Year. That kind of really took off. We saw a lot of searches for that. Or those kind of, I feel like we've had a lot of like television omniculture moments this year. White Lotus finale, Severance finale. We see that also pop on the back end on Giphy that people are really looking to talk about

the things they care about in culture too. So what about like going back to the crashing out example, because that's definitely very much like TikTok Gen Z language. When you find one of those trends on the Giphy platform, do you feel like it's often things that you haven't heard of or your team hasn't heard of and it's emerging? Or is it usually just kind of reinforcing things you're already seeing?

That's interesting. So there are a couple ways that we look at data. One is kind of this proactive search. So I have a dashboard where I can just enter words that I find or that I notice out in the wild, and we can make the recommendations. If we see that there's a certain volume of searches, we make the recommendation. A lot of advertisers come to us to talk about that.

to speak to the Gen Z audience. So say, oh, we saw this on TikTok. You know, we have creative strategists that are in charge of kind of following those trends. But we also have a trending dashboard where we see things that really have a lot of variance day to day. And that's where we can see a lot of athlete names pop up or kind of phrases that we're like, gosh, why are people talking about that? And then we might back into the search to figure out kind of where that certain series of words is coming from if it feels like a sentence, not a proper name.

What does crashing out mean? Just for, I'm asking for the audience. There aren't many things that crashing out doesn't mean, honestly. It's a pretty all-encompassing term. It just kind of means like, Jeremy, what does it mean? It just means crashing out. Yeah, I was going to say that's part of the point of this. It's like when you see it, you know it, you know how to explain it, but it's visual. I don't think this means anything. It does mean something. It definitely does. It's like vibe.

Doesn't mean anything. Vibe does mean everything at the same time. I don't think vibe means anything. Vibe has come to mean nothing. Well, it loses over time, because it kind of becomes amorphous, right? But at the start, it had... Okay, not to deal with us. Jeremy, Jeremy, rough topic. Can you please focus, both of you? It's Emmy's fault, sorry. What kinds of... Alex, what kinds of... Well, actually, really quickly, you said that you've got this dashboard and you're seeing kind of

Spikes of certain gifts at certain moments. Do you also see ones that like what share of gifts just sit at the top of the charts all the time? Like 20% kind of room for those new folks who kind of come and go? Or are you seeing like really high turnover across pretty much all of them?

That's a really good question. I think that the answer is a little bit of both. We know through kind of studies that we've conducted, like audience studies, that people really like finding new gifts. So we see if people like finding gifts that feel like they're discovering something new that their friends haven't seen. So when we're creating gifts for the platform, we have a dedicated studios team. We'll try to like the secret like element that we're trying to hit on is something that almost feels familiar to

but unexpected like you're the first person who saw the meme you know you want to be the hipster of the gif but they're also like all the iconic um all the iconic ones that you can think of the kermit sipping tea um i don't know the um of course i can't think of any on the spot homer in the bushes all of those i think people um there are some definite definite like frequent john travolta being like yeah

Once from movies, you'd be surprised how many people still want to see an Ace Ventura. Or Anchorman. That escalated quickly. I think there are some like real classics that will always drive some search volume, but people like a little freshie once in a while for sure. Okay.

My question is how far will people scroll to find the perfect gift? Sometimes I'm 15 minutes in and I spend way too long here.

I think it depends. We have power users. I think we see a lot of engagement on that first placement. That in the search, what we sell to advertisers is like the promoted placement is that first one in the trending feed and search because chances are people are moving quickly. If you're in conversation and you're like in the group chat, people are sending gifts, you want to get the reply quickly.

So we do a lot of work to curate to make sure that that first result is the most popular, is exactly what people are trying to say when they're looking for something. But there's some gold if you dig. Because we have a lot of people who are constantly uploading new content and it takes a while for it to rise algorithmically. So it depends on what kind of GIF user you are.

Oh, I'm digging. I spent way too much time on this. Sorry, Jeremy. Is it hard to, because one thing I'm really curious about is just trying to educate, let's say, a sponsor on what makes for a good GIF and just to understand culturally how to be present within this ecosystem in a way that doesn't feel intrusive. I feel like that's always a bit of a challenge. Yeah, one of the things that's...

that's particular to giphy is that if you're doing a paid campaign with us part of what you get is creative services so a lot of the time we can just say like leave it up to us we got we got you of course we have best practices and it really is um surrounding kind of talking about what's in the moment when you're running your campaign so making sure that seasonality is correct making sure that the expression is really clear so leaning into kind of exuberance goes

Goes a long way, you know, like you want the human expression to be adaptable to a lot of people, but be very clear. And if it's not, we always advise to add text so that people when they're in search, again, in that group chat, trying to fire them off really quickly that it is exactly what people are looking for and that people are more likely to use that and share it.

you mentioned the human expression um i'm curious how is giphy thinking about ai and trying to stay authentically human in some of those connections the way gifts connect people

AI, if we must. It's hard. I'm sure you noticed as I answered the artist question, I'm such a huge fan of painting, which is like the one, I mean, the AI can make something that looks like a painting. We really believe that GIFs are...

our way for humans to connect. And I think it needs to feel like a human being made it and to really understand emotion, human emotion. I really feel like the results are best when it's created by someone who has put kind of a little heart into it and really kind of understands where this might appear in a conversation, in which context, and really hits

the heart of what people are trying to express, whether it is something silly that makes someone laugh or something that is really sincere. We see a lot of very sincere content. Those greetings that I mentioned earlier, like a happy Mother's Day. Obviously, we want

sincere content to be to land properly. If people are using GIFs to have kind of more difficult conversations or kind of say things that they're uncomfortable saying, like, I love you, I miss you. We really think that having that human touch is important to connect people.

You were talking about some best practices for brands working with Giphy. Could you give us an example or two about some kind of successful examples of how brands worked with Giphy? Yeah, definitely. There's no kind of real secret sauce because the

possibilities are endless. We can work with all sorts of advertisers because what people can say with GIFs is kind of endless. The possibilities are endless. But I thought of a couple of examples. One that did really well last year, we worked with AMC. They have Fear Fest around Halloween each year and they kind of resurface classic moments from movies. So we had this Chucky evil laugh GIF that did great, like busted all the benchmarks.

We also worked with CPG brands a lot last year. Last year was kind of our first year back in market and we worked with Mug, which is a Pepsi brand, and we made all these gifts of their mascot that's named Dog. It's just a large dog. And we made these gifts that kind of utilize the root beer in unconventional ways. So there was a good morning gift where he was kind of

pouring two big bottles of root beer into like a giant coffee mug and it said good morning and it did really well and one of the things about mug is that this was the first campaign we were able to partner with a measurement partner named adresta and we did kind of a sales of study using um

sales data and we got a 4.1% sales lift on the whole campaign. So we know that these kind of like silly, unconventional, we call them unhinged dog gifts, drove actual sales for this brand. And the other thing

that I would point to is we did this great campaign with Call of Duty where remember we were just talking about the classic meme gifs they wanted to use those gifs to insert this character that they created called the Replacer that was part of all their TV campaigns so the Replacer is this guy that comes and replaces you at work wherever with your family when you're so you can go play Call of Duty that was the whole campaign it was this

He's like an iconic character actor. This is like creepy looking guy. So he was the replacement in all their TV ads. And then they recreated all these GIFs where they replaced Homer in the

in the bushes, replaced like Jonah Hill freaking out. They did a ton of these GIFs and the attention to detail, they made a Muppet of him to be Kermit sipping tea. And they kind of like took over Giphy for the day to like drive attention to the new Call of Duty. And that also did awesome. There was so much chatter, like what is this guy doing in all the GIFs? And it was a really cool moment for us last year. - Nice. What should brands not do when it comes to GIFs?

I think, oh, this is a really tricky question because I feel like I can recount. So before we relaunched last year, we had our ad business was active from 2018 to 2020. And I became...

so confident in my ability to make a successful ad out of anything. At that time, there was a gift that we made for REI. They have their act outside campaign where they encourage people to recycle and go outside. And we made a gift out of literal footage of trash and added text to it, put it against the right wall.

the right search terms and it did well and people engaged with it. So I would say there are a lot of things that brands can do to adapt what they're already working with into GIFs. I think treading carefully with the authenticity thing is important, making sure that you're not trying to force a certain phrase onto something like a mismatch from a caption to the expression.

One of our best practices that comes into play a lot when we work with entertainment brands where they are working with a lot of existing footage is not having kind of two scenes or like an exchange in one gif. It really needs to be like one message at a time because you have to think of people are searching to say one thing at a time. But other than that, have a ball. I think.

Gifts are, we can really make anything work and there's so many conversations that can be had with gifts. So you can do more things right than you can do wrong as a brand. And then the very fact that you're able to demonstrate some kind of sales uplift I think is remarkable.

Great, because there are so many executives where if they don't understand something, but they are willing to look beyond that to be like, but we can see that it's actually going to work, then they will lean in and they will observe and they'll try new things. Because I think everybody's really trying to break through the clutter in some way, shape or form. They don't want to do the same campaigns as every other competitor.

Definitely. You just have to think about how unique it is that your brand can show up in people's conversations. And for every share, which is what one of our main metrics is this engagement metric, we consider a click an intent to share. You can imagine that that went in a comment or a conversation and got seen by more people. So I think...

The thing about GIFs is that they're, and advertising with Giphy, it's very unique to the platform. Nobody else is kind of doing this GIF advertisement. So it's almost kind of hard to explain in simplicity. It's just like, it's a visual expression. What's next for the company?

Good question. We're working a lot right now to kind of make sure that we're working with our clients to meet their needs with kind of the new measurement stuff, like really exciting studies that we talked about, but kind of the more bread and butter that they might be looking for. Every vertical has its own kind of measurement.

study and we're adding functionalities like geo-targeting, but we're also testing ads internationally because Giphy is global. So right now we're testing in Mexico and Brazil and we're hoping to add ads in Canada and UK in the next couple months. Very nice. That is all we have time for, unfortunately. Thank you so much to my guests for hanging out with me today. Thank you first to Jeremy. It's a pleasure as always. And then to Emi. Thanks for having me. Thank you to Alix. You're welcome.

Thank you to the whole editing crew, Victoria, John, Lance and Danny. Stuart runs the team and Sophie does our social media. Thanks to everyone for listening in to Behind the Numbers, an email-to-video podcast made possible by Giphy. We'll be back on Monday talking about AI attitudes. That's attitudes towards AI, okay? Not artificial intelligence that has an attitude like Henry, who's going to be on the episode, thought happiest of weekends, except Henry because of his insane assumption.

Hope yours is fine.