The visual power of GIFs
Have you ever thought about what makes you click on a news article, a post your friend shared on Facebook, or on any other link or advertisement, besides for the fact that you are interested in the topic? People form a first impression in a mere 50 milliseconds, so when a complex article has an engaging image attached to it, people are subconsciously more likely to have a look at it.
Numerous marketers and data analysts have formed an opinion that almost 90% of communications will be visual by 2018. It’s the time of pictures, videos and GIFs, and businesses are completely aware of that. The most important aspect of a successful marketing campaign or a stand-alone communication, is obviously the message you are trying to get across to people. However, keeping things interesting and varied is often the tricky part.
Take GIFs, for example — they are nothing new, but their use is more popular than ever. GIFs are very easy to consume, because they don’t give you a lot of information to dissect, yet they boost your interest and engagement. It is a fact that people actually only remember around 20% of the text they read without visuals, which makes a strong case for visual power. GIFs originally became so popular because brands knew that they were cheaper to produce than videos, but in the end, more interesting to watch than ordinary images.
Many of us scroll through the news and do our research on our phone, so for a company, using GIFs would be highly beneficial because they play automatically. If you were to have a broken roof and you were looking at different companies to turn to, the chances are, you would be more likely to choose the one which has the most professional, engaging, and customer friendly website. As GIFs last for a couple of seconds on loop, the file size is smaller and uploading them is faster compared to videos, so they are ultimately extremely mobile friendly. No problem with the page not loading properly!
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but as the average GIF contains sixty frames, they are capable of conveying 60,000 words — the same as an average novel. As people are becoming more and more used to traditional ways of advertising they become less receptive to it, which makes it crucial for brands to be creative and try new ways of getting their message across to people. GIFs have truly become the epitome of modern Internet culture and long gone are the days where they were just for geeks. Businesses, however large or small, have embraced that and use it to liven up their online activity.
You can say that an animated GIF is a hybrid between an image and a video. Photographer Jamie Beck of Cinemagraphs thinks of a GIF as a “photograph that is still alive“. It is a beautiful sentiment, which ultimately means that people can engage quickly, as with an image, yet they can extract a lesson from the movement, like from a video. An ideal GIF can evoke any emotion depending what a person or a business wants it to. It could be funny, smart or surprising, but in the end it is the simplicity and elegance, which make it the perfect little tool to get the audience hooked.
