It’s new feature rollout month at iRewind and oh boy, do we have a gif(t) for you!

Drumroll, please.

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Surprise, it’s GIFs!

As anyone familiar with the internet already knows, GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format) are all the rage. You can find them on social media, blogs, in your DMs, and even on reputable news sites. If you’ve been living under a rock and have never heard of these 25-year-old digital workhorses, GIFs are the best moments in a video distilled into an endless highlight loop. They’re great for capturing and replaying a single moment into eternity—often to powerful or comedic effect.

Personal Micro-Moments

Are you wondering what GIFs have to do with personalized video software? The new GIF feature means our software is now even more personal. Just imagine:

You’re at the lake with your friends. There’s a crowd because there’s also a giant waterslide. You love waterslides! A brand sponsoring iRewind’s technology brought cameras. Not only did they bring cameras, they’ve installed them at fixed points along the giant waterslide.

You wait in line. It’s time to slide. You slip, slide, flip, and flop into the water. There’s an enormous splash and…and…and… the crowd goes WILD!

And it’s all caught on video!

What’s better, your personalized video is immediately uploaded to the cloud and delivered straight to your inbox, where you can instantaneously create your own GIFs from your favorite video moments and share them on all of your social media accounts, messenger apps, and even embed them in your website. Congratulations, with zero effort, your great moment is now a meme!

Personalized GIFs really make a splash.

GIFs as an Emotional Force

The impact that GIFs have had on internet discourse is hardly surprising because they marry the best of video and still images together—packing a one-two punch straight to our emotional receptors.

How can something so simple be so powerful? Abigail Posner, Head of Strategic Planning and Agency Development at Google, wrote to Fast Company, “In the language of the visual web, when we share a video or an image, we’re not just sharing the object, we’re also sharing in the emotional response it creates.”

And brands are scrambling to harness the power of GIFs (as well as other shareable branded media) in the hopes of creating viral content that emotionally connects with their audience. Rather than creating marketing content that is simply viewed, companies want to create campaigns that their audience can interact with, enjoy, and share to their networks. With GIFs, they want to tap into the immediate, emotional human communication that can be so hard to express in text or video alone. This interactive form of marketing can be subtle, but is often more impactful than traditional, passive marketing campaigns.

GIFs Mean Business

With the new GIF functionality, iRewind sets the stage for audiences to engage with brands in a fun and exciting way while enticing them to instantaneously share branded content intuitively and seamlessly. It’s a win-win: the audience receives a digital souvenir of their exciting moments and the company that licensed iRewind’s personalized video software for an event, a fixed installation, or festival gains large scale, positive brand engagement that can be measured through an easy-to-read analytics dashboard. It’s as simple as that.

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Also published on Medium.