TLDR: Giphy has a plan to reach “billions”
By Fast Company
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“ The Giphy folks have been tasked by the Emmys producers to “live GIF” the show, creating those seconds-long video loops used to enliven digital conversations and get shared. The effect is a dizzying bit of pop culture meta-commentary
“ GIFs are a kind of social currency… The ability to use GIFs in a skillful way that is fresh and new and completely on point has become really important. It’s like being able to text really well. Or take a good selfie.
“ Giphy has capitalized on its cultural currency to amass an audience of 300 million people who see a GIF from Giphy every single day, triple its total since just December 2016. They share more than 2 billion GIFs a day across Giphy.com and the many platforms where Giphy is embedded: Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, iMessage, Slack, and even Zendesk
“ cofounder and CEO Alex Chung says, “We think we can grow like probably 3 times what we have now, which is kind of crazy.”
“ Giphy, which is reportedly valued by investors at $600 million
“ The next phase will unfold as they roll out Giphy’s ad products and measurement tools over the next 12 months or so.
“ “everyone is moving to the six-second ad format,” he says. “YouTube has done it. Facebook is doing it. We’ve owned that format for years. We have all the tools to make it. We have the largest distribution of that six-second content anywhere in the world — across mobile, desktop, anywhere.” Perhaps most important, Giphy has commercials that look nothing like advertising. “If it’s good,” says COO Adam Leibsohn, “it’s stuff that people want to use — to communicate, to laugh, to inform.”
“ he knew how to structure deals that would be attractive to entertainment companies. In exchange for getting access to shows like The Simpsons and Broad City, Giphy would work with network and studio marketing teams on their “GIF strategy.” In other words, Chung’s crew would help them set up their pages on Giphy; explain how to make GIFs more discoverable; and even make the GIFs themselves by running content through Giphy’s auto-tagging machine that finds the best moments.
“ As premium content started to stream in [Giphy] began to carefully map out a plan to “work with social networks to get GIF buttons inside of places where they weren’t … We knew that if we could get GIFs on Facebook, it would be a thing.”
“ I think of them as the Google for GIFs” GIFs have become their own form of digital communication, and as a brand, we want to make sure that our series and our characters are part of the shorthand that these younger generations are using
“ Although the current vogue favors wide social distribution over trying to create a destination, Giphy.com and its app, which currently draw 250 million users a month, are an underrated asset for the company. “We’ve started seeing more and more people just hanging out to watch content … We’re like a TV network to some extent … We program, we schedule, we have tune-in blocks.”
“ Everyone is fighting for this one-hour primetime segment … We think we can own those 23 hours of the day.
“ It’s a potentially salivating proposition: Demographic specifics plus users’ tastes and interests plus an understanding of their emotional behavior. “In the same way that we learn massive amounts from Google Search and what people are searching for on YouTube [Giphy is] an expression of their intent for Lego as a brand.”
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