Warner Bros. + Tenor: Movie marketing in a mobile messaging world
Lego Batman won big — not just with a box office tally already well over $225 million worldwide, but also with fans who shared GIFs with friends and family in mobile messages, driving nearly 110 million mobile GIF views to-date, including more than 20 million during opening week.
Tenor and Warner Bros. teamed up to fuel this fandom, creating a custom GIF collection featuring about 100 short video clips from the film — designed to help people communicate their thoughts and feelings in mobile messages and create excitement about the movie.
The bet on this new medium paid off. To-date, the official GIFs have been shared about 600,000 times — representing brand advocacy that generates excitement about the film. Tenor began seeding Lego Batman content into its mobile GIF-sharing platform in late July and tightly integrated the GIFs into its Emotional Graph in mid-January, making it easy for people to express themselves in mobile messages.
“Connecting emotionally with consumers has always been the big win in marketing,” said David McIntosh, co-founder and CEO of Tenor. “We help our partners tap into the Emotional Graph, which maps the thoughts and feelings people most want to communicate in mobile messages to the short video clips that help them express themselves better than words ever could.”
Popular emotions Tenor users expressed using Lego Batman GIFs:
High Five
Flirty
Whoa
No
Let’s Go
Even as Lego Batman continues to drive engagement — both at the box office and in mobile GIF sharing — Warner Bros. and Tenor are already thinking ahead to September, when Lego Ninjago will open in theaters. Fans are already starting to discover and share the early content seeded in the Tenor platform, driving more than 10 million mobile GIF views in less than three weeks.
Tenor empowers more than 200 million people each month to add tone to their mobile messaging conversations by adding GIFs that visually communicate their thoughts and feelings — better than words ever could. We process more than 200M search requests daily and have used this data to build the Emotional Graph, which powers our GIF Keyboard app and GIF sharing for partners including Apple iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Twitter, Google Gboard, Slack, Kik, LinkedIn, Kika, TouchPal and others. Learn more about becoming a Tenor GIF API partner here.
