by Both the official websites for Sleeping With Other People and Black Mass featured GIFs. The idea is, obviously, that this is 2015 and GIFs have become a language in and of themselves on the internet so offering these on the respective websites would make it easy for people to grab them or otherwise share them, incorporating them into their other conversations. But see if you can spot the difference between the two examples:
Do you see it? Yeah, it’s that the Black Mass GIF doesn’t throw all sorts of marketing messages in your face.
I understand what the SWOP team is trying to do. At various milestones on the way to release (which was very limited, for some reason…it still hasn’t made its way to the Chicago suburbs, which is odd) the team created GIFs that marked the occasion. That means people who are following the movie’s various social media channels can share those and spread the message. So that makes sense from a marketing point of view.
From a long-term usefulness point of view, though, the Black Mass GIFs have much more value. It’s easy to see someone using that “money going through the counting machine” GIF over and over again for a long time. Yeah, it might not always be directly related back to the movie, but it’s going to circulate for a while. It has long-term potential.
These are extreme examples to some extent – there’s a lot of room between an image where branding is thrown into every corner and one that’s completely generic and could come from anywhere – but it’s illustrative of the fine line marketers in all industries must walk. While they want to create these sort of sharable assets, if they go too far in making sure the branding remains intact then they actually diminish that shareability. And sometimes it’s better to err on the side of foregoing some marketing requirements in the name of providing something that will become part of people’s organic conversations online.
