In this Marketing Over Coffee:
Learn about the Art, Business, Culture of GIFs and more!
Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite
John is always using Ted Lasso
And Robert Downey Jr.’s Eye Roll
Gif versus Jif? (It’s all good, but the company is not Jiffy)
They did the Peanut Butter Jar
Neil Patrick Harris for Buble
GIPHY Stickers
The first GIF creative agency
7:25 Wix Studio is the web platform that gives agencies and enterprises the end-to-end efficiency to design, develop and deliver exactly the way they want to!
Getting her start in Infographics! Then to BuzzFeed in 2012
GIPHY reflecting the changes in the culture
Avoid “How do you do, fellow kids”
Kindness is on the rise
NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.
Media recommendation! Problemista written and directed by Julio Torres
Find Alix on LinkedIn and learn more about GIPHY Ads here
Her webinar July 18th at 1pm! Make Your Brand Part of the Actual Conversation
Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie
Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access!
Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters.
Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Speaker 1 – 00:07
This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.
John Wall – 00:14
Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. Today, we are talking with Alix McAlpine of Giphy. I’m just thrilled to talk with you today because I have just taken GIFs for granted my whole entire life. I’m using them all the time. It enriches everything that I do, but I’ve never dug in to say, “What’s the business behind this? What does Giphy do?” And so I’m just excited to learn everything about all this stuff here. Alix, thanks for joining us.
Alix McAlpine – 00:39
Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here and to talk to a GIF fan. I want to hear if you have a favorite that you’ve been using a lot right now.
John Wall – 00:48
Oh, well, *Ted Lasso* has kind of cornered the market, so pretty much everything Ted is always big. And then, another one is Robert Downey Jr. eye-rolling. That gets a lot of play in our Slack group.
Alix McAlpine – 01:02
Amazing.
John Wall – 01:02
So that’s another big one. Okay. And so we do have to talk about — I’m sure you’re completely sick of talking about this — but GIF versus Jif, and how does that fit into, and especially as it’s part of the company name.
Alix McAlpine – 01:14
Yeah, that’s a great question, and we get this question a lot. The answer is that both are correct. So there really is, you just pick which side you want to be on. I think we have people who prefer to be kind of a language purist, so they side with GIF, as in gift, like a gift that you send to your friends. And there are those who align with the creator of the GIF who did pronounce it Jif.
And I find that people are really locked into the side that they’re on. So if you’re having a conversation with someone, we call the company Giphy, so we use GIF at the company. But we’ll have meetings where people are using Jif, and they are not budging. So I feel like people are very passionate about the side of the pronunciation debate that they’re on. But we accept both because both are right.
John Wall – 01:58
You’re okay with both? I could totally see being okay with GIF or Jif, but if I was running the company, I’d be like, “No, it has to be Giphy. It can’t be Jiffy.” Are there any employees that call it Jiffy?
Alix McAlpine – 02:12
No. I think it is kind of a red flag if you call it Jiffy Giphy. I don’t think I’ve encountered any employees, but it’s certainly — we had a campaign a couple years ago, I want to say in 2020, we ran a campaign with Jif the peanut butter, where we made like a jar that said Gif on it to kind of play into the debate. That’s been a really fun thing to point back to when this conversation comes up. The jars, if I remember correctly, sold out on Amazon right away. We made actual physical jars, and they became kind of collector’s items that day. It was a really fun moment.
John Wall – 02:45
Oh, I’m so excited to hear that because, yeah, I knew about that. I had seen those jars, but I didn’t realize that was a campaign that you guys hacked. That was you?
Alix McAlpine – 02:52
Yeah, it was in partnership with Jif.
John Wall – 02:54
Okay, so, yeah. And those are still — that is still lore that you can buy those for premium dollars on Amazon or wherever you can find them if they’re still on auction.
Alix McAlpine – 03:03
Yeah.
John Wall – 03:04
Tell us about the company. I mean, I have no idea how this fits into the whole scheme of the internet.
Alix McAlpine – 03:10
Yeah. So, Giphy is about to be 11 years old. It was started in 2013, and it kind of just came from this idea of powering visual conversation. And at the time, people were using GIFs. I think people were finding them on other platforms, but there wasn’t kind of a centralized way to index them and discover them and really kind of accelerate this notion of GIFs as a visual communication tool. So that was founded then and then kind of grew over time.
I joined in 2016, so by then, there were quite a few people on the team: editors kind of curating the library, partnerships staff that was working with media companies and artists and musicians to make sure that everything that was created in video, kind of throughout the web, was funneled into Giphy as bite-sized pieces. When I joined, we started a studios team to create original content and really kind of make Giphy more of an entertainment and communication platform by creating all this original content with these amazingly talented animators.
From there, we’ve developed talent. Shoots became a big thing where people would come through. We used to work — maybe giving you too much background — but we used to work out of this home in LA. When I first moved here in Hollywood, it was like off Melrose, just one of those kind of new builds with a pool. We turned one of the bedrooms into a green screen shoot room where people would come through on their press stop. So, new musicians would come through, and we would create reaction GIFs of them, and so kind of filling the library with all these great pop culture figures and really kind of helping accelerate how much people were using GIFs in their conversations.
And then, I can get into — in 2018, we launched our advertising business. And so that is what our focus is on right now again. But back then, we were very lucky to partner with Pepsi. It was our first big advertiser. We helped them launch Bubly, which was their sparkling water that launched in 2018. That campaign was based on creating 1000 GIFs of their spokesperson, who was Neil Patrick Harris, and that really helped us take off at the time. But right now, Giphy is Giphy. We’re still growing the library. We’re in — I want to say 14,000 apps — we’re just everywhere, powering communication. So, it’s a really fun place to work.
John Wall – 05:28
Okay, so then the big idea is that it’s the library, that’s the content that you’re building the whole company on. And it’s that content that gets shared and used in other places. You create custom content. Do I have that right? That that’s the primary business model?
Alix McAlpine – 05:41
That’s correct. It’s the library. And then, the special thing about the library is the distribution. So it really lives everywhere that people are communicating in this visual way. It’s in messaging, social media, and commenting platforms. We also have a product called stickers, which are GIFs without the background, and you’ll see those kind of in stories and video apps. People use those to ornament existing pieces of content. So really, anywhere that we can — I think you used this word — enrich conversations, or existing media, you’ll find Giphy.
John Wall – 06:12
Is usually there. As far as working with clients, obviously, so then advertisers must come to you and say, “Hey, we want to get a whole bunch of GIFs for whatever the launch is, or whatever this product is.” Is it basically like you guys are a creative ad agency, and they just come to you, and you start building things?
Alix McAlpine – 06:28
Exactly. That was the vision for the studios team back when we started in 2016, was to make it the first GIF creative agency. And so, we work, we have a creative strategy team in the advertising department that kind of works with the data and makes sure that brands are building campaigns that really align with not only what is endemic to their brand — so, things that they can really own, areas of conversation that might be a little bit more niche and less competition in the search — and also align with great tentpole moments to make sure that they take advantage of moments in pop culture or in sports and, holidays and such.
And the last element that we really try to advise on is also leaning into popular searches, so making sure that they take advantage of the amount of traffic and engagement that those popular searches get. So we kind of sprinkle in three areas to make sure that brands have, like, great coverage in terms of the conversations that they can be a part of.
John Wall – 07:25
Okay, got it.
It’s like as we open the box, there’s a million other things I want to ask you about that we can get into. Before we do that, though, we just have to take a second. We want to thank Wix Studio for their support of Marketing Over Coffee. I’ve only got one minute to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. Whether you manage 10 sites or 1000, here are a few things you can do from start to finish in a minute or less on Studio: Set up native marketing integrations in a click. Reuse templates, widgets, and sections across sites. Create a seamless handover by adding tutorials, guides, and more to client dashboards. Work on the same canvas at the same time with all your team members and leverage best-in-class SEO defaults like server-side rendering and automated structured data markup across all your Wix sites. Time’s up, but the list keeps going. Step into Wix Studio and see for yourself. Check it out over at wixstudio.com, and we thank them for their support of the show.
Yeah, you’ve kind of blown my mind in that — okay, so it’s a flavor of ad agency. And yet, you guys have this distribution channel that no one else has. You’re in all the social media channels. You’re baked into all these different apps. I mean, I see you over in Slack, and we’re over in messaging, and it’s over here in the channels. Is that even a fully established part of the business now? Do you even have a team that sets up the channels and works with integrations and stuff like that? Or how does all that work?
Alix McAlpine – 08:44
Yeah, I can just say we have a business development team, and we have dedicated engineers that make sure that everyone that integrates Giphy has a great experience and access to the content that’s the best for their users.
John Wall – 08:57
So with the advertising product, is the idea that it would eventually be self-serve, or are you guys always kind of doing bespoke campaigns and a more white-glove for clients thing?
Alix McAlpine – 09:08
Right now, we’re just focusing on direct sold campaigns and really trying to lean into this custom content and making the experience really fun and seamless for the users. So one thing that we do, obviously when you’re in search, it’s all contextual targeting, and we know that contextual targeting can be most successful when your content is really good and really eye-catching. So we advise brands on how to use their existing content.
So we work a lot with entertainment brands to cut down trailers or episodes from shows and kind of adapting them into these pieces of visual communication, little pieces of self-expression if you will. Or we do kind of like soup to nuts full productions. We have a facility in Chinatown in LA with a really big green screen if we want to do a green screen, or we’ll build sets. And we also have a great, very talented animation team that I mentioned earlier that can make little custom vignettes, 3D animation, anything that really is eye-catching and very expressive for the brands to get their message across to our users.
John Wall – 10:14
Okay. And I do have to rewind just a little bit here, too. Tell us about your career and how did you end up at this company doing something that’s totally revolutionary to the ad industry?
Alix McAlpine – 10:25
Well, thank you. What a great way to put it. I’ve worked in branded content since 2010. So, since the hot new thing at the time was infographics, I worked for a creative agency that was doing a lot of infographics and some stunty stuff. We’re the people responsible for the first Foursquare check-in in space, working with NASA back in the day, doing some — I’ve always been kind of fortunate to work in this delightful kind of like internet space.
Because after that, I went on to join BuzzFeed in 2012 when they were just kind of accelerating their branded content business, and I was one of the first members of the creative team. I helped them build their US teams and also their teams abroad and really kind of ride that wave and pushing, sponsored posts and quizzes at the time, but really working with all this young talent that really helped bring such great creativity and uniqueness to the offering for all the brands that we worked with. After four years at BuzzFeed, I was asked to join Giphy, and it’s been — I’ve been there for a long time, eight years — but it’s been, I think, every couple of years there’s been a new challenge or a new exciting thing that we’ve worked on. So it’s been really fun. But I’ve always kind of straddled creative and business. And so, right now, I’m a little bit more heavily indexed on the business side but still really advising on the creative piece to make sure that the experience is really fun for brands and users alike.
John Wall – 11:53
Okay. Yeah, that is just an amazing checklist when we think about — because we’ve been doing the show for over 15 years now — and so, yeah, I remember there was a time where infographics were just, that was everything. There were entire agencies that did nothing but infographics. And then Foursquare, isn’t that a Boston area company? I mean, they’re still around, they still do some crazy stuff, but that’s — yeah, that’s amazing, too.
Now, tell me if I have the right feeling here. I just get the feeling that you are an artistic slant. Are you, do you have a lot of graphic design training in your past, and do you come from that angle?
Alix McAlpine – 12:25
I cannot draw to save my life, but I do think I have a good eye, and I am creative. I think I index more on the side of — I was a writer, I went to journalism school and worked in the music industry before I worked on all this stuff. But I kind of got my start on the internet because I was a blogger, and so I was kind of a creative director for copywriting. And then, of course, been fortunate to learn the ropes at Giphy, working with a lot of visual artists and flexing that muscle. So I have a good eye, and I call myself the optimizer.
I can just — because I think I’ve worked here for so long — I can really tell when something is going to function or not in a conversation. And that’s the value I bring on the creative side.
John Wall – 13:06
Yeah. Okay. So that writing, storytelling skill, editing, and being able to get to the point — that is huge when it comes down to getting the story out there.
And I do have to ask about BuzzFeed, too, because that’s a whole nother area. That was just insane. Do you have anything from your profile as far as interesting stuff that happened there, things that you can talk about?
Alix McAlpine – 13:24
I mean, every — so we were in New York. That’s where the business started. I think we launched the office in LA in 2013. And it was — I don’t know how to describe it. It was so fun. It was like college 2.0 for a lot of people because the staff was very young, and there were happy hours every Thursday. There were always kind of celebrities stopping by. It was unreal. We had so much fun.
And on the business side, it was just a crazy time to be there because we doubled year over year when I was there. So, as someone whose job was dedicated to hiring and training new creatives, I was kind of the growth person. I ran a fellowship where we hired kind of fresh talent that didn’t necessarily have copywriting backgrounds but had kind of like a promising sense of how to work a BuzzFeed post. I just got to meet a lot of people and grow the business, and just — I hate saying, like, I was on the rocket ship, but it really was an exciting time. And it was such a moment in culture, also, to see video start, BuzzFeed Video and all those people, all the talent become celebrities.
There are so many crazy days. I remember one day I was getting lunch — we had this catered lunch — and I went to get lunch, and the only other person in the cafeteria was E-40, who was like a really famous Bay Area rapper. And I was like, “Why is E-40 in the cafeteria?” Stuff like that would happen all the time. It was really fun.
John Wall – 14:48
I knew you would have some interesting tales about that because that was, it was the classic internet rocket ride — how things went crazy.
So what was actually the switch to Giphy then? Did you know somebody there? Or had you already done some work with somebody that pulled you in?
Alix McAlpine – 15:02
I actually had a relationship with someone — I think through Twitter at the time — named Nick Weidenfeld, who ran this animation studio called Fox ADHD. They had a segment on Fox, and they did little animation shorts, and they also had a GIF presence. They did GIF the news. And when Fox ADHD didn’t get renewed, they were acquired by Giphy. Part of that team is what started Giphy Studios.
And so Nick remembered that I worked in branded content, and he had come to actually give a talk to the creative team at BuzzFeed while I was there. I would bring in people to talk to the creative team about their creative careers and how they balanced being a creative at work and outside of work, and how to keep your sanity — it’s always a balancing game. And he just hit me up and was like, “Hey, I think you might be good for this job.” And I applied and flew out to LA to meet the team, and I was fortunate enough to get hired.
John Wall – 15:56
Aha. That’s great. You passed the test, made it through the screen. That’s great.
As old man Gen X, I just consider GIFs to be a miracle. I come from an age where you didn’t have access to video. So the fact that I can put a three-second video to share a joke or make a point, that’s just a pure miracle to me, and I love doing it all the time. But how about for the rest of the marketplace because we hear about Gen Alpha burning out on tech, or the way millennials look at things. What’s the company’s stance on that? Or how do you guys profile everybody across the board? Is it a matter of that just X percent of the whole world uses this, or is there any other story that you tell about this?
Alix McAlpine – 16:35
That’s an interesting question. I think there’s this notion that young people don’t like GIFs or find them cringe. And I’m here to dispel that rumor. We really see kind of an even spread in each kind of age group. Gen Z is there, millennials use them, Gen X is there. We don’t have data for people under 18, but I know that we have users from — everybody uses Giphy. I mean, the reach is unbelievable, so you can really imagine you can reach anyone in all these different types of apps that we’re in.
We’re in a lot of workplace apps, so maybe that audience is a little bit older. We’re in dating apps, we’re in social media apps, so every app has a different user profile. But what I will say is one thing that I find really interesting about Giphy is how it reflects culture and language as it evolves. One of my favorite things to do, if I see an article — there will be, like, a New York Times trend piece about a new piece of slang that people are using, or I’ll run into a new expression on TikTok — and I love to go in and see, “Are people really searching for this?”
And I can see this. Gen Z — I think Gen Z is having a moment right now where we’re all kind of more aware of these new phrases that they’re using because of TikTok and kind of the access that we have now to youth culture through TikTok — and I love to see “rizz,” “delu,” all of those words that kind of surfaced last year, they are rising and continue to rise. And so we find it really exciting to see that and to offer advertisers an opportunity to kind of be part of those conversations. I would say tread lightly when it comes to, working in Gen Z slang because it can very easily be — what’s that meme? — “How do you do, fellow kids?” Tread lightly. But we know the users are there, so we can align in a really organic way with the way that people are talking.
John Wall – 18:26
Right. And so how about for the future? What kind of stuff is on the product roadmap for you? Obviously, now that I get the idea of you’re doing content for everybody, so it’s basically anyone who has a story you could come up with something around. But is there anything that you guys are talking about or showing off as, like, here’s how we think this is going to go forward in the coming years?
Alix McAlpine – 18:45
The thing that’s interesting is, GIFs are a form of self-expression. So I think as self-expression adapts, new apps are built, new ways of expressing ourselves grow, I think Giphy kind of follows that as it follows culture, like I just said.
But in terms of the ad product itself, I think we’re right now at a stage in our business — since we just relaunched our advertising efforts last year — where we’re really learning from our advertisers, and what they’re looking for right now is really different than last year or two years ago. And so we’re really spending a lot of time listening to what makes the offering more appealing to them and making sure that it’s also appealing for the users.
So one thing that we just launched this week, we had a premiere for a TV show, and we sponsored the search bar, which we’ve never thought of doing before, but it’s this, it’s the most engaged with piece of the website. And so you can have a little bit of branding in the search bar, and it looks fun and colorful and dynamic.
We also have a new banner — you know, if people are really into homepage takeovers still for these big tentpoles — and we really do see the user behavior for Giphy around holidays, or something like Mother’s Day, where people are really connecting one on one to talk about certain occasions. Our user engagement goes up, and the traffic goes up. So those are really good times to be a part of Giphy, and I think we’re discovering those every year, there’s a new one that pops up as user behavior changes. That’s how we are evolving and hopefully providing something fun and new as we go along.
John Wall – 20:20
Yeah, and you had said something, which I had never thought of, was actually plugging into dating apps. That’s just kind of, that must be an interesting thing to track and follow. Are there any other things like that as far as channels where you never expected to see it or trends pop up, just things that the average public would never know about?
Alix McAlpine – 20:38
You know, one thing I’ve observed in the last couple of years as we kind of shifted to work from home, there’s a lot of behavior that’s kind of risen to the top of, like, our top 100 keywords centered around marking the passage of time. So, “Happy Monday,” “Happy Tuesday,” “Happy Wednesday.” People are greeting each other in the workplace or in their group texts about days. People are really celebrating seasons, and it’s really interesting. We knew — “Good morning.” “Good morning” has always been one of our top, top keywords — but I found this really interesting, and more positivity. I want to say connecting GIFs, the side-eye is important. The eye-roll, I think, is the one you mentioned. But a lot of positivity rises to the top. Telling somebody “Happy Monday” is about the most wholesome thing you can do, and we find that people are doing that. Millions of people are doing that every.
John Wall – 21:29
Month through Giphy.
Usually, going out the door just to get a personal touch, we always ask if you have any recommendations for our audience as far as media, books, news in the marketing space. Just anything that you’ve caught recently that you could recommend.
Alix McAlpine – 21:43
I don’t have something closely related to Giphy, but I just — when you said movie recommendation, I just thought of this movie I just saw on a plane a couple of weeks ago, *Problemista* by Julio Torres. And he is — do you know Michel Gondry?
John Wall – 22:01
No, no. This is all the director.
Alix McAlpine – 22:03
I think Michel Gondry did *Eternal Sunshine*, and he makes these movies that are really kind of dreamlike. This movie really reminded me of Michel Gondry. It’s beautiful, lots of magical realism, a lot of heart and humor. And it features Julio Torres, the director and writer himself, but also Tilda Swinton, who just feels like a very otherworldly person, and RZA, a member of Wu-Tang Clan. So I just love that. And if anybody just wants to, like, take a break from reality and have just a dazzling film, I thought that would be my recommendation to anyone. I’ve been telling all my friends to watch it.
John Wall – 22:40
Oh, that sounds great. Yeah, well, I’ll include a link to that, and we can put the trailer over in the show notes so people can check that out. That’s — always appreciate a good. Yeah, a distraction from reality is a wonderful thing.
Alix McAlpine – 22:51
Definitely.
John Wall – 22:53
So you’ve got a webinar coming up next week, too. Tell us more about that.
Alix McAlpine – 22:56
Yeah, we’re doing a webinar with Adweek on Thursday, July 18. I believe it’s at 1:00 PM Eastern. It’s called “Make Your Brand a Part of the Actual Conversation,” talking all about being a part of pop culture and conversational media, how to really activate on those tentpoles as they’re coming up for the holidays, and hopefully, we’ll have a little fun, too.
John Wall – 23:18
All right, that sounds great. We will plug that in the show notes so you can click right through.
Alix, if people want to find out more about you or Giphy, what’s the best way to get in touch?
Alix McAlpine – 23:27
Best way, I think you can find me on LinkedIn. I do have a hard-to-find name, Alix, not Alex, McAlpine. But I think if you look for Alix Giphy, you’ll find me. And ads.giphy.com if you want to find out more about our ads business and how you can plug in.
John Wall – 23:43
That sounds great. Yeah, well, we can put your LinkedIn right in the show notes so people can click through over there. And that’ll do it for this week. So, until next week, enjoy the coffee.
Speaker 1 – 23:52
You’ve been listening to Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. Read more from John J. Wall at jw5150.com. The Marketing Over Coffee theme song is called Melo G by Funk Masters, and you can find it at Music Alley from Mevio or follow the link in our show notes.
