10 Questions With David McIntosh (S1, Ep10)
Tenor’s chief executive explains why we’re fond of GIFs, how he wants to capitalize on it, and ways visual communication has changed.
What is it about animated GIFs, those image files that oftentimes make it easier to convey what we’re trying to say versus typing it out? They’re everywhere, from being plastered across social networks to our emails and messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp. A big part of the proliferation of GIFs is thanks to a company called Tenor, formerly Riffsy. It has helped make embedding GIFs naturally into our conversations. But it’s much more than a form of expression, which Tenor’s chief executive David McIntosh has shared with me in the past.
While some might think that the insert of a GIF into a conversation is funny, it’s usage highlights its sociological impact. Truly a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is something that after more than five years, Tenor wishes to capitalize on. Prior to its acquisition by Google, it made moves into helping brands monetize GIF usage, seeking to establish what McIntosh believed would be the emotional graph.
More than a year under Google ownership, I caught up with McIntosh to find out how things are progressing, whether its new parent has impacted the roadmap, understand why GIFs have taken off, and what’s next for Tenor. Our conversation is this week’s “10 Questions”.
What drew you to focus on GIFs and how has this file type become quite dominant in how we communicate across the web, text, messaging apps, and in the workplace?
When we started Tenor, GIFs had existed on the web for more than 20 years but they were very hard to use in mobile messaging. You had to leave your messenger, open your browser, Google for a GIF, click through a bunch of links and then switch back to your messenger — which often took several minutes!
In the fall of 2014, Tenor launched GIF Keyboard which made it easier to search and share GIFs inside messengers. We then natively integrated Tenor’s GIF search engine into popular messengers and communication apps such as Twitter, Samsung Keyboard, Facebook, Discord, and many more. Fast forward five years later and hundreds of millions of people use Tenor to find the perfect GIF to visually communicate what’s on their mind.
As mobile messaging continues to grow, people are looking for ways to better communicate and express themselves beyond simple text. It’s hard to convey tone over text, and text is cumbersome to input on our phone. Tenor’s key strategy is to make it as easy as possible for people to find the perfect GIF to express exactly what’s on their mind. Communication is a universal human need and my co-founders and I were drawn to building a service that has the potential to help every mobile user around the world better communicate.
In 2017, Tenor debuted its first ad product and real-time analytics tool for brands. Two years later, how has that been going and are there plans for Tenor to release additional offerings for brands to capitalize on GIFs?
We’re seeing growing demand from brands to market their products in the mobile messaging context through GIFs, and we’re continuing to invest in products for our brand and media partners.
How should brands and advertisers be approaching using GIFs to reach their audience? Some have embraced it such as Dominos, but others like the NFL in 2016 came out against GIFs at one point during games. What advice would you give brands considering getting into the GIF game without making it seem like it’s forced and assuages fears that their product will become the next meme?
Tenor works with brands from large media companies such as Fox, NBC, and Paramount to independent creators, providing people with GIFs they’re looking for and helping these brands expand their audiences. The most successful brands on Tenor construct their GIFs to help users communicate. It’s not enough to chop up a trailer or advertisement into dozens of 2–3 seconds GIFs — a GIF must help users express themselves with a specific message or sentiment.
You told me that Tenor’s goal is to own the visual language. Why is this important and in what ways is Tenor going to do so?
Our goal is to help everyone using a mobile device better express themselves visually. Today, people send hundreds of billions of mobile messages daily, and as bandwidth speeds are increasing and bandwidth costs are decreasing, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which 10–20% of messages sent are visual — GIFs, memes, stickers, and other dynamic forms of content.
Our overarching focus is to reduce the friction to express yourself visually by providing the most relevant GIF search results for the billions of distinct queries Tenor receives across dozens of countries — the faster you find the perfect GIF the more likely you are to express yourself visually.
Your company was acquired by Google a year ago — how has this benefited Tenor in growth and are there integrations already taking place? Will we see Tenor’s technology incorporated into Google AdWords, for example, or integrated within the core Google search engine?
It’s been a very busy year! Some highlights include launching an expanded integration in Gboard, releasing an integration with Google Go, and adding a long list of new content partners. We’ve been working on a number of other initiatives that we’ll plan to share more about over the coming months!
How do you see artificial intelligence changing how we react to messages (e.g. surfacing the right GIFs without us needing to query it) or search for things visually (do tools like Google Lens, Pinterest Lens, and Bixby Vision impact how GIFs are discovered)?
Eliminating the need to type out a search query would dramatically reduce the friction in using Tenor to express yourself. We’re looking at a number of ways to make it even faster to find the perfect GIF.
Prior to the acquisition, Tenor was powering more than 12 billion requests every month. How has this changed since then? Any other trends you’re noticing around GIFs?
Tenor has grown significantly since the acquisition and is experiencing fast adoption around the world. For example, at the end of 2018, we shared that Tenor grew 5x in India in the preceding 18 months. As faster bandwidth is becoming more affordable and pervasive, people are looking for richer, more visual forms of expression, and Tenor has been investing in localization and search which improves the experience worldwide.
What were some challenges when you were building Tenor? How was your team able to persuade Apple, Facebook, Google to understand the power of GIFs and why it should be embedded in their conversation tools?
Tenor’s integration into messaging partners was driven by a groundswell of user demand. Tenor’s successful launch of GIF Keyboard on iOS and subsequent growth caught the eye of the industry and in the following 24 months many of the largest messengers integrated Tenor. By focusing on improving search relevance we accelerated the phenomenon — the quicker someone finds the perfect GIF, the more likely they are to share it, which then prompts their friends to search for a GIF to reply with, and so on.
As a serial entrepreneur, having started Redux in 2008 and Tenor in 2014, what lessons have you learned about starting a business and finding an idea that resonated with a large audience?
Building and scaling the right team to pursue the opportunity is crucial. As the business scales, hiring talented executives and giving them the responsibility and space to run portions of the business acts as a force multiplier for continued growth.
How has visual communication evolved and what has Tenor done to adapt to these changes?
When Tenor first launched, only a fraction of our users searched for GIFs. The majority of people used categories to browse (eg: “happy”, “nod”, “thumbs up”) because searching for an expression or sentiment was an unfamiliar experience. As users became more accustomed to expressing themselves visually they started searching for more nuanced and specific queries, and today the majority of users find a GIF to share by searching.
As Tenor invested in localization, it grew rapidly around the world and we started to see more GIFs featuring local celebrities or holidays appear in the top 100 most shared GIFs for individual markets.
We’re continuing to invest deeply in Tenor’s search product, and looking ahead we’ll continue working to make it effortless to find the perfect GIF.
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Special thanks go out to David McIntosh for participating in this discussion. “10 Questions” is a project designed to learn more from the people in tech and how it relates to businesses. If you’d like to be interviewed, I’d love to hear from you — send me a note on Twitter (@thekenyeung), Facebook, or here on LinkedIn. You can also find this entire series shared on Flipboard and also on Medium.
#tech #GIF #google #tenor #design #graphic #search #visual
