What’s not to love about a GIF?

The Graphics Interchange Format begin in the late 80s but has become an indelible part of our culture 30 years later thanks to increased support and the numerous platforms that support them today.

Online GIF database and search engine Giphy boasts serving more than 1 billion GIFs to its 100 million daily active users who view over 2 million hours of GIFs each day.

Attention Grabbing
GIFs are a different from of communication that combines the power of visual imagery with the movement of a video.

Set to loop, the repetitive movement of GIFs is eye-catching as people scroll through news feeds, read blogs, or catch up on emails. Simply put, GIFs are just fun to watch.

GIFs are like mini videos, minus the sound. It’s important to note, video is predicted to grow to 84% of internet traffic in the U.S. in 2018.

Easy to Process
Our brains respond better to visual content. 90% of the information that is transmitted to our brains is visual, and our brains respond 60,000 times faster to visual content than plain text.

In fact, people generally only remember about 20% of what they read without the help of visuals. Only about 10% of what people hear is remembered 3 days later without visual content paired with it, but that number jumps to 65% when an image is included.

Add in that our attention spans are only about 8 seconds, one second less than a goldfish’s.

GIFs are simple, straightforward, and easy to interpret, understand, and remember. They can often be the visual content you need to deliver a noticeable and memorable message.

Mobile-Friendly
GIFs are versatile and mobile-friendly – an important fact as over 75% of Americans own a smartphone and spend nearly 3 hours on them each day.

GIFs work on multiple platforms, including websites, desktop advertising and remarketing, mobile advertising, social media content and advertising, and email marketing.

Emotional Impact
Giphy’s CEO once likened the power of GIFs to the old cliche, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” saying “ … (if) the average GIF contains 60 frames, then they’re capable of conveying 60,000 words – the same as the average novel.”

GIFs help to create an emotional impact, even a subconscious one. We often think of GIFs as humorous, but GIFs are also capable of delivering feelings of sadness, anger, frustration, or pride.

We know emotions are key to delivering a message. Read more.

Wait, there’s more …

How do you pronounce “GIF”? Is It a soft or hard “G”? Find out here.