Advertising Week’s Attention Summit opened with Twitch’s senior vice president of client strategy Anthony Danzi repeating the adage of how the average human attention span has dwindled from 12 seconds in 2000 to about eight seconds today—which compares unfavorably to a goldfish’s nine-second attention span.
“We are all in the business of attention, and that business is getting more difficult in the age of content saturation and platform proliferation,” Danzi said during the presentation’s opening remarks.
Whether or not the comparison to goldfish is true, the challenges are real, and brands need to find ways to quickly and unintrusively convey messages to audiences. Tenor’s chief business officer Jason Krebs, who also spoke at the summit, believes he has the perfect solution—and it’s something that you see on just about every platform, from text messages to social media: the GIF.
“GIFs have changed how the world communicates,” Krebs said during his presentation while celebrating the 30th anniversary of the image format. Emotional communication has evolved from simple text-based expressions such as “lol” to short looping animations clipped from shows, movies and events that fully capture feelings. Krebs explained that visual expression has created a fundamental shift, as inserting nonverbal communications into mobile conversations gives people a feeling that’s akin to having face-to-face personal conversations.
Tenor is the largest GIF keyboard for mobile users and social platforms, and as the animated format has become the leading means of communication for many users, the platform has come to describe itself as “the world’s largest emotional search engine.”
“People are using our GIFs to express their emotions, feelings and thoughts in text messages, chat profiles and social media all around the world,” Krebs told AListDaily. “We like to say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but a GIF can tell a story. People are using these visuals to communicate with friends, family, coworkers and social audiences in more nuanced, enhanced and flavorful ways than ever before possible—better than text or emoji.”
Krebs noted that it’s not that people haven’t been using GIFs in the past 30 years, but the rise of mobile has significantly changed the game.
“The prevalence of people communicating more often on mobile devices has unlocked the capability of the GIF,” Krebs explained. “Tenor comes in and makes it a real platform for consumers to send these rich thoughts and feelings, but we also enable businesses to partake in the platform.”
By platform, Krebs is referring to the social networks themselves in addition to marketers and advertisers. Although emoji is still in great use, and Apple is making them more animated, Krebs said that comparing a GIF to an emoji wasn’t dissimilar to comparing text to a movie. Both communicate thoughts and feelings, but one has a richer, more visually appealing format. Furthermore, unlike other media, direct messages usually don’t go ignored or overlooked.
“The beauty of GIFs is that it is being sent from one person to another,” said Krebs. “Everybody is certainly being bombarded with more information, but there isn’t anyone who doesn’t pay attention when they get a text message. They are read 100 percent of the time.
“You don’t skip it, not look at it, or not pay attention to what’s going on because somebody is sending you a message and you’re going to reply to it. That’s what’s unique about this opportunity. It’s not just a media consumption opportunity—this is a communications platform that has never been open before to marketers. Now we’re able to serve these messages with one-to-one communications, and consumers are opting in to this.”
As an example, Krebs said that a brand like Coca-Cola could connect with a person looking to express happiness with a smile, given its slogan, ‘have a Coke and a smile.’ That’s just one of thousands of creative insertions and placements advertisers are afforded with.
Tenor partnered with NBC to promote the premiere of Will & Grace using GIFs, and it’s currently working with Paramount and AwesomnessTV on similar branded content promotions.
“We want to give IP owners the opportunity to put their conversation out in the marketplace—the concept that’s unique to them—and give their fans an opportunity to use them,” said Krebs. “In one way, it’s simply people consuming [the IP], but it’s [also] giving Will & Grace fans the opportunity to communicate using clips from the show. It’s been incredibly well received, and more marketers are picking up on this idea of putting their content into GIF form so consumers can share it.”
Krebs cited a UC Berkley study that found 27 distinct human emotional states, up from six in a prior study. So, representing this range of emotions is more important than ever, and search is the key aspect. Although Will & Grace fans likely sought out related GIFs in anticipation of the show’s premiere, Krebs said that a large majority of people who discovered these branded GIFs by searching for emotions.
“When people are searching for ‘happy,’ ‘fun’ or ‘excited’—anything that they’re looking to communicate—then they will appear organically within the search result, and that’s when consumers can choose to share,” said Krebs. On Tenor, similar to Google, brands can choose to have their content rise up as search results organically or they can pay to have featured at the top of search results.
Although there are some obvious emotional connections brands should pursue, like choosing fear-related words to promote content for the movie IT, Krebs said that there is a multitude of less obvious considerations too.
“There are things people can do—whether it’s little moments of the shows or topics that they’re looking to achieve,” said Krebs. If someone typed in ‘sad,’ I think you could imagine a travel company telling someone not to be sad and it’s time to take a trip somewhere. There are lots of ways to turn certain keywords or clever opportunities into the turning point for what your brand’s premise is or what its product looks to solve. The beauty of what we have is that there’s no harm or foul if you miss that tone because the brand isn’t paying on an impression basis. It’s only has to pay with the GIF is shared.”
“The beauty of what we have is that there’s no harm or foul if you miss that tone because the brand isn’t paying on an impression basis.” — Tenor chief business officer Jason Krebs
To illustrate which feelings are searched the most, Tenor created an emotional graph. However, Krebs says that it doesn’t mean that less popular terms won’t be just as effective, since the platform can both fulfill and create demand.
“It doesn’t have to be as literal as someone typing in the word ‘yes,’” said Krebs. “We’ve got a lot more opportunities with words that are synonymous to yes and other things that we’ve linked with those terms. We’re not afraid of running out of opportunities to make matches between marketers, content owners and brand imperative and what consumers are looking for.”
For now, it doesn’t seem like brands can make too many GIFs to service different emotions, but Krebs said that marketers tend to know when their campaigns resonate with audiences.
“I don’t think we’ve gotten to any place where enough is enough,” Krebs said. “The greatest thing about marketers and advertisers is that they know when they’re speaking to their core audience well and when they’re making advances. We would know and give them feedback if images are not being shared. So yes, I think the sky is the limit for the overall community, but we don’t think that everything anybody does is perfection. That’s why we’re here to help manage the process and steer it in the right direction.”
To mark this year’s Advertising Week, Tenor released the top 10 GIFs that had increased in use in New York City during the event, and it looks like the Big Apple was in a very positive mood. “Thumbs up” GIFs saw a 2,725 percent increase in use, followed by a 1,600 percent increase in “yass” and a 1,050 percent increase in “sick.” Additionally, terms such as “party,” “let’s do this” and “mind blown” also saw significant increases.
“We’re pumped about having our finger and attention tuned to human emotion and how it’s being communicated,” said Krebs. “The opportunity to match the emotional state of a consumer has not been an opportunity for marketers before. Now that we have this, it’s unlocking the greatest opportunity for marketers in a generation.”
