Orchestrated Moments Make for Highly Shareable GIFs
Most of the GIFs you see were created with a purpose. They were calculated to be timely for bite sized micro-moment content.
by Michael Chiem
I’m a huge GIF nerd and I recently made a GIF-tastic discovery — mass media outlets are now consciously planning GIF-able moments in advance to join the GIF entourage, such as scripting dialogue in shows to make for perfect and relatable one-liners, and identifying moments that can be turned into a GIF when editing film content.
The report linked above stated that news channels and award shows will increasingly curate and create GIF-friendly moments — moments that truly represent pop culture — and that public figures will increasingly be trained to seize opportunities that would make the perfect GIF (i.e. the Obama mic drop or POTUS Trump “Wrong”).
In short, brands and public figures are now ‘performing’ with GIF-based content in mind, a so-called scripted GIF-able moment, in hopes of capturing a cultural moment that puts their brand in front of millions of eyeballs. This scripted behavior is a good example of how content is being produced in this era of Modern Media Culture.
Communication-wise, GIFs are used as a tool to convey emotion. If brands can create content that can be used to communicate emotions, consumers can use such GIFs to express their ‘feels’ in their everyday lives…ultimately allowing the brand to become interwoven in culture.
In a recent article in Time, Millennials stated that GIFs and emojis communicate their thoughts better than English, which is probably why most of your favorite social platforms are embracing the GIF button feature.
In fact, 2-billion-user strong Facebook is the latest to embed a GIF button in its comments section; below are some examples:
All entertainment verticals, including TV, movies, music, award shows, sports and others, have a massive opportunity to create GIF-able moments. When the camera is on, sometimes it’s good to be a little extra. (How to be extra.) And if the moment is good or as the teens say, ‘iconic’, you don’t even have to create the GIF yourself…other people will create the content for you just so they can be the first to post it online.
Here are four examples of how media platforms are capitalizing on GIF-able moments during entertainment events.
Unscripted Moments in Award Shows: From Miley getting called out by Nicki Minaj, or squad goals.
Sport Games: From showing off your talents on the field and the relatable bromance.
TV Shows: Writers will purposely script dialogue and work with talent that can be turned into GIFs and spot opportunities when editing the film that are highly relatable/sharable, as seen in FOX’s Empire (360M views on GIPHY), FOX’s The Mick, and most notoriously in the Real Housewives franchise. Love them.
And according to GIPHY, GIFs covering anything presidential commanded over one billion views and added to the political commentary. Well damn.
It’s pretty cool that GIFs can tell you what happened during the event, right? Tell that to the people who aren’t actually watching the shows. We have social media and cord-cutting to thank for that. All the information on what you missed can be found as real-time social posts, live tweets, and play-by-plays in GIF formats, like this Tumblr GIF set of the 2017 Oscars Moonlight fiasco.
Pretty cool that GIFs can tell you what happened during the event, right? Tell that to the people who aren’t actually watching the shows.
GIFs are also proving to be a lucrative business investment too. The “Google search engine of GIFs”, GIPHY, with a valuation of $600M, is even creating their own standalone apps like Giphy Cam to encourage people to create and share their own silly GIFs in seconds. They’ve tapped into the fact that ‘being yourself’ is a cultural trend, one that generates mass awareness and now $$ for GIPHY too.
All in all, we should level the playing field of deliverables, including videos and images, to plan for more content around GIF-able moments amongst our content strategies. GIFs make for shareable, engaging content that is also highly discoverable.
Over the past few years, we have seen that entertainment success is made up of moments that get the world talking, or are at least relatable within your community of friends. Now imagine discovering your next favorite thing, like a new show or TV personality, based off a relatable GIF reaction that was sent to you. Is there a GIF for that?
Michael Chiem is a Community Manager at Mistress. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn at @michaelchiem.
