More and more movies and TV shows are working with GIF hosting and search engine company Giphy. Either the studios and networks are creating GIFs and then hosting them there or they’re handing over media for Giphy to make into a collection of GIFs through their creative studio. With GIFs being the lingua franca of the social web it’s more important than ever for entertainment brands to be creating these and offering them to the audience.

What I’m not seeing is consistency in how those GIFs are promoted. Two examples illustrate what I’m talking about.

First there’s Keanu, which has a profile and which was obviously using the GIFs hosted there throughout the campaign on various social networks. But while there was some promotion given to that on Twitter, that’s about it. Compare that to the profile for Mother’s Day, which was not only promoted on social media but also got a link all its own on the movie’s official website.

keanu giphy

It’s like the creatives want to have it both ways, with this repository of media available to them but not really out there for people to easily find. But Giphy is for GIFs what YouTube is for video and almost every movie website links to the latter, either to the studio’s channel or a movie-specific playlist.

If Hollywood wants to be serious about offering GIFs to the audience that are tied to current movies they need to start promoting these Giphy profiles more steadily and effectively. If there are objections to doing so that are based on these profiles being movie-specific and not long-lived or something else along those lines, it should be noted that those same arguments can be made against launching movie-specific Twitter or Facebook accounts. More likely it’s just that this is a new platform that hasn’t quite come into enough mass awareness to really get the front page treatment. But it’s time that changed.