GIFs as Political Commentary, Movie Marketing Tool and Easier Than Ever to Create
Yes, as Mathew Ingram points out, GIFs have replaced much of what used to pass for political discourse. You can learn everything you need to know about the Republican debates by seeing a GIF-based recap as you can from the spin doctors making the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows. They are to the internet what soundbites were to radio and TV decades ago.
And yes, GIFs are just as much a part of how the audience reacts to movie trailers as they are in how they react to music videos. It’s now a matter of minutes between the time a new trailer drops — especially a big one like Star Wars, The Avengers and so on — and the time there are reaction GIFs that are circulating around news sites, Twitter, Tumblr and elsewhere. Considering the incredibly short turnaround time on these it still boggles my mind that studios aren’t releasing GIFs at the same time as the trailers so that there’s officially sanctioned material out there. That’s not going to stop fan creations, nor should it, but this is a “it literally can’t hurt” situation. Every email to a press outlet that includes a link to a new trailer should include two dozen GIFs.
The growing — and already substantial — popularity of GIFs is why Tumblr has (finally) added easy GIF creation to its mobile app, allowing people to make them out of either videos or photo bursts on their phones or other devices. That’s very similar to Instagram’s recent Boomerang app, which likewise takes short videos or photo bursts and turns them into somethinv very GIF-like. Considering Tumblr is responsible for the revival of GIFs as an art form the only thing surprising about this is that it took this long to create. That joins other GIF-related updates like Twitter’s Scratch, which allows you to rewind and play with GIFs.
If GIFs aren’t part of your content marketing plan, they should be. Even moreso than short-form video, GIFs are super-important to be creating in-house yourself. They require even less effort to view, particularly on mobile devices, than video since there’s the inherent assumption that not only do they not have audio but that they’re only a couple seconds long, making them easy to consume while you’re waiting at the bus or just killing a few minutes on Twitter or Tumblr. Videos, even the short ones that are all the rage right now, still require more of a commitment.
GIFs are currency. They are how we now think when pondering reactions to people and events online and how we express ourselves. Not only do they allow us to show what sort of pop culture we’ve aligned ourselves with (in my case it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Marx Bros, Albert Brooks, Mel Brooks, Monty Python, Friends and so on…) but how creative we are. Or at least how refined our search skills are if we’re not creating them ourselves.