GIFs are not a new formation, but today, they are consumed faster than ever before. This is related to shifted consumer habits towards understanding and enjoying the content only within seconds. It’s not surprising that brands also prefer GIFs.
This diagram shows the market position of GIF regarding popularity and traffic compared to the most popular image file formats.
Why Using Gifs is a Smart Way for Marketers
- Gifs are Easy to Consume
As we mentioned above, the most outstanding feature of Gıfs is being very short and consumed within seconds. When we consider consumers’ attention span is 8 seconds at best, the reason GIFs are becoming more preferable by marketers is really clear.
- Gifs Can Be Used on Multi-platform
Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. These are the most popular ones, but you can use GIFs on many social platforms. Thus, a brand may use them to all of them accordingly. People behave differently on every social network, but GIFs are still popular in all of them. Of course, it is not necessary for you to use the same GIF content for all these channels.
- Gifs are Telling a Story
Advertising is not only promoting something to the consumers. You should give them value that is fed by a story. Each GIFs is telling a little story to the consumer which they can enjoy.
- Gifs are More Effective than Image and Cheaper Than Video
From the beginning, we want to show you in our blog posts that interactive and moving content is rising for quite some time, instead of the image. However, when you consider the cost of this kind of content, GIFs are again more feasible than video and other moving contents.
- Gifs Are Mobile Friendly
Like other platforms, the power of GIFs is valid for mobile platforms and mobile advertising as well. Grabbing users’ attention on mobile with current mobile advertising standards is getting harder. Therefore, mobile marketers should apply to different approaches like GIFs instead of serving banner ads, which are ignored by many people on mobile. Don’t forget the GIFs file size is smaller and also uploading them is faster compared to videos.
Dive into your imagination with Oreo. pic.twitter.com/A5fckhLpmJ
— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) August 16, 2016
Oreo
How can you use the GIFs in mobile advertising?
Mobile advertising is not just mobile advertising anymore; it’s becoming a part of the conversation in a natural, organic way. Yes, GIFs are everywhere today, and they are becoming a specific language, especially for young audiences. You know this younger audience is living on their mobile phone, aren’t they? J GIFs provide them a new way of living and expressing themselves on mobile; because GIFs are easy to share, rapidly renewed, enjoyable and cool! This is a great way to express emotions and thoughts in a way that words and photographs struggle to do.
Brands also can use this rising star to create huge mobile engagements. The important point is that not showing it like pure advertising, because it has to give the audience sharable content depending its nature. Thereby, to encourage interaction from users, it’s important to create GIFs, not ads. Here you can see a very successful mobile ad example as a GIF.
Is there something on our cheek? pic.twitter.com/MqyQYAFckr
— Wendy's (@Wendys) June 18, 2014
Wendy’s
We are waiting for you! You can share with us your experiences about using GIFs on mobile platforms as an ad format. 🙂
