Give your brand the gift of GIFs

It's clear, attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. First we had 3 hour movies, then 1 hour movies. First we had 60 second spots, then 30, then 20, then 10. First we had books, then we had comics, now we have tweets. Videos too, are not immune to this trend. First we had 5 minute videos, then 2 minute videos and so on. Now we have GIFs - 5 or 10 second wonders that express a lot in a short time.

The Harry Potter universe had magical moving pictures. Of course, why use static images when you can magic some moving pictures! Then, we must wonder why we continue to use so many static images in our personal and business communications, on social media and elsewhere. Ever since Facebook, Twitter & Google allowed GIFs in recent years, the many different ways in which GIFs can be useful keep increasing daily.

Who should seek GIFs?

Everyone! Here at Ripple Digital, we strongly believe in the power of GIFs. GIFs can be like a commercial that pops up in the hours long ‘movie’ of browsing your social feed. GIFs can be animated (i.e. cartoon/illustrations) as well as made using moving images. We have in fact developed a format for videos where the first 10 seconds are the GIF, and the last 30 seconds are like a regular 30 Second Commercial. The part in between contains the details.

Benefits of GIFs

GIFs are entertaining, they auto-play, they are small sized so they load immediately without any buffering, they are simple, you just click on them and they play, no size, resolution and other settings to bother with and best of all they are easy to share on WhatsApp and elsewhere. It’s an image format from the 90s, that has somehow recently caught the craze of the mainstream after being used in niche circles online. Almost everyone clicks on a GIF in their Twitter feed. Just because there is something to be played, it gets played.