Uncharted territory, GIF, takes a turn for Advertising Initiatives

The most uncharted territory lies within the three to five second, noiseless video you find hidden with in your mobile keyboard.

Gifs, short for graphic interchange format, are everywhere. Although they've been around since the 1980's, GIFs have become a primary way for millennials to communicate their emotions over text.

Shortly before this outbreak, Emojis took the hot seat. The emoji keyboard supported by Apple represented a way to visually express your emotion via text. Animated Smiley faces, objects, and actions took place of words and expressions for the first time in history. Millennials and Gen Z were first adopters of this trend, as they continue to push short, visual content in the digital world.

At this time, these generations had already ben using emojis to represent visual expression through text. With the rise in popularity of emojis followed GIFs. A GIF presented a new way to express emotion with short text and moving images. Riffsey, CEO of Tenor, launched the mobile version of the GIF Keyboard.

The GIF’s consist of a three to five second motion “video” with no audio sound. Most have a three to six word text lying over the video. Unlike certain image and video media, these looping GIFs play easily with any bandwidth on any device, including smartwatches. From Beyoncé to the office, gifs are the perfect way to express your emotions and expressions via text. So how can gifs move toward advertising efforts to create revenue?

With five billion GIF views per month, this one year-old company is quickly growing in advertising efforts. If you scroll through the GIF keyboard, you will find thousands of videos from TV shows to movies, or characters and celebrity videos. GIF’s do not have the ability to advertise full movie trailers or TV series, but what GIFs can do is create character and brand awareness.

The entertainment industry is first to make this GIF advertising adoption. Riffsy paired with 20 Century Fox to test this monetary opportunity out. What he found was through a “Minion” themed GIF, the awareness grew quite rapidly. It was shared over 80 million times on the mobile keyboard.