Sharable GIF platform GIPHY is adding Koddi’s commerce media infrastructure and LiveRamp’s audience capabilities to its advertising platform, giving brands more sophisticated ways to target, manage and measure campaigns across GIFs, stickers, reactions and search.
GIPHY already allows brands to create and promote GIFs and stickers that appear when consumers search for particular words, emotions, occasions or reactions, which it commercialises through its GIPHY Ads business. Instead of placing a conventional display advertisement around a GIF, the branded GIF is usually the advertisement itself. Consumers find it, select it and then distribute it by sharing it in their own conversations.
Koddi’s technology will now provide more of the underlying infrastructure needed to manage campaigns, serve media and optimise performance at scale. LiveRamp adds identity resolution and audience activation, potentially allowing GIPHY to combine the context supplied by a search with more sophisticated advertiser audience data.
From sponsored search to commerce media
GIPHY’s advertising model is built around what might be termed “conversational search”. Consumers search for visual ways to express an emotion, reaction or occasion, from “congratulations” and “cheers” to “hungry”, “Halloween” or “Friday feeling”.
Brands can create GIFs and stickers aligned with those searches and pay for them to receive greater prominence. GIPHY also offers placements within its trending feed, takeovers on its owned properties, bespoke content creation and some linkable formats capable of directing users towards a campaign or brand destination.
The difference from conventional advertising is that consumers actively choose the branded asset and share it with somebody else. The person selecting the GIF becomes both the audience and the distributor of the advertising.
GIPHY describes the proposition as creating “ads people share, not just see”. The company claims a daily reach of more than 1 billion users and says it serves more than 10 billion pieces of short-form content each day, including through integrations with messaging and social platforms.
Koddi’s involvement should help GIPHY evolve this from a largely contextual, keyword-led advertising proposition into a more automated and audience-aware media business.
“Consumers don’t just interact with brands when they’re shopping. They connect with them while they’re searching and sharing,” says Eric Brackmann, VP of Commerce Media at Koddi. “This partnership brings commerce media capabilities to those moments, helping advertisers activate campaigns more effectively while giving GIPHY the foundation to scale and monetize its advertising business.”
Bacardi shows how the model works
A previous GIPHY campaign for Bacardi provides a useful illustration of the existing model. GIPHY developed a collection of 27 Halloween-themed GIFs and stickers for the drinks brand. Some adapted Bacardi’s existing creative, while others used a specially created vintage woodcut style. These were then distributed against relevant Halloween-related searches, helping Bacardi appear when consumers were looking for content to express a mood or add to a conversation.
According to GIPHY’s Bacardi case study, the strongest GIFs achieved five times the usual engagement rate, while the campaign delivered a 26% increase in intent to share.
This was advertising delivered through search, but it was also branded content designed to travel. Once selected, the paid placement could move beyond GIPHY and into messages, group chats and social posts.
Koddi and LiveRamp add another layer to this model. Instead of relying predominantly on the relationship between a keyword and a piece of creative, GIPHY should be able to introduce more advanced audience selection, campaign pacing, decisioning, optimisation and measurement.
“As we continue to grow GIPHY Ads, we’re focused on delivering more value to advertisers while creating a scalable foundation for long-term growth,” says Kevin Hein, Chief Growth Officer at GIPHY. “Koddi’s technology helps us streamline campaign activation, improve performance and build the infrastructure needed to support the next phase of our advertising business.”
Commerce media moves into conversation
Strictly speaking, GIPHY is not a retail media network. It does not sell products, control a checkout or possess the purchase histories available to Amazon, Tesco or Walmart. The deal is nevertheless important to the wider commerce media market because it demonstrates how media networks are being built around signals other than transactions.
GIPHY owns a large digital audience and sees billions of searches, selections and shares. Those activities can reveal mood, cultural interest, occasion and sometimes commercial intent. A search for “pizza night” is not the same as searching a grocery website for frozen pizza, but it may still reveal a commercially relevant moment.
This potentially gives brands access to consumers before they enter an established shopping environment. It also creates inventory inside conversations that conventional display advertising struggles to reach.
The unanswered question is how closely GIPHY engagement can be connected to commercial outcomes. The partnership announcement promises improved activation, optimisation and measurement, but does not explain whether advertisers will be able to attribute a GIF interaction or share to product discovery, store visits or purchases.
Without that connection, GIPHY Ads remains an inventive form of contextual and branded advertising supported by better ad technology. With it, GIPHY could become a distinctive offsite commerce media channel, allowing retailers and brands to activate audiences during the expressive moments that precede shopping.
For GIPHY, the deal offers a route to build a more scalable advertising business around its enormous distributed reach. For Koddi, it demonstrates that its technology can power media networks well beyond retailers and marketplaces. And for commerce media, it provides further evidence that almost any company with an owned audience, valuable signals and an addressable digital experience can now position itself as a media owner.
