Schitt’s Creek has the Best GIFs and marketers should be taking notes.
Schitt’s Creek is a Canadian Comedy show created by Eugene Levy and Dan Levy, and last week it won Best Comedy at the Golden Globes, while Catherine O’Hara won Best Actress. While the show has many merits - and I highly recommend you watch it - there is only one thing I want to talk about today.
It’s GIF game is strong.
On Giphy — the gif hosting site recently acquired by Facebook — the Schitt’s Creek account has uploaded 3,600+ gifs for a total of 5.5 billion views. Even if you have not watched the show Schitt’s Creek, I can guarantee with almost certainty you have seen a GIF of the show. They’re everywhere!
And its all thanks to the smart people behind their marketing strategy.
So let’s break down what it is Schitt’s Creeks are doing with their GIFs, and then we’ll explore why they are getting so many views.
On Giphy their GIFs are sorted into two categories: Characters & Reactions. Characters covers the main cast of the Rose family (Moira, David, Johnny, Alexis) as well as members of our supporting cast inclduing Stevie, Ted, Patrick, Jocelyn and Roland. Surprisingly, their Reactions category only covers OMG, Fail, Nervous, Happy, Over it, and Yes.
Nearly every GIF features captions and what’s makes a Schitt’s Creek GIF™️ distinctive is the use of yellow text to emphasis the key word in a sentence. This also where the actor put emphasis when they delivered that line, which makes it easier to read in their voice, and also to read as comedy. Schitt’s Creek are also not using the oversued Impact font that has become associated with Memes & GIFs.
This use of coloured text for emphasis is a simple style choice, but it is one that is consistent throughout Schitt’s Creek official GIFs and something that differentiates it from fan GIFs. That, and the quality of the GIF itself as they obviously have the source files to work from.
What’s really specially about Schitt’s Creek GIFs compared to other brands is the restraint. Too many brands make a good GIF ugly by slapping on garish logo placement. Natually, the first and foremost goal of this content is to promote the show, but Schitt’s Creek favours a transparent Hashtag and network logo that remains discreet. It’s there, but it’s not obstrusive.
So let’s talk about the GIF content itself. There is a Schitt’s Creek for most day-to-day scenarios as well as some more outlandish dialogue from the show. For most social situations you can find a GIF to express yourself through Moira’s dry wit, Johnathon’s wholesome confusion, Alexis’ bubbly optimism, or David’s depressive sass.
With 3.6k uploads, they have a lot of moments from the show covered, but these moments were still carefully selected for their use as reaction GIFs.
This is the critical part of their strategy: they make sense to use as a GIF, even if you haven’t seen the show.
For comparison let’s take another intellectual property: Jupiter Ascending — the 2015 escapist space opera where Mila Kunis can control Bees because they recognise she’s alien royalty. These GIFs overtly feature the movie’s logo and serve no use to anyone looking to use a GIF to communicate an emotion or idea, they are just clips from trailer. When would I need a GIF of Mila Kunis struggling to float in a shaft of blue light? I know I have seen this movie 3 times but I still don’t remember any of these scenes happening.
Okay, maybe that’s not a fair comparison. How about we look at the AppleTV Giphy account. With only 800 million views, it is considerably smaller in its reach than Schitt’s Creek which is only one show. Immediately we can see why — these gifs don’t have a clear use case.
The gifs from Defending Jacob (I haven’t watched it either) are a great example of the trap marketers fall into when creating GIFs. They are thinking only of creating content that would benefit them if people shared it, but the GIFs themsevelves don’t express anything meaningful.
These gifs are overwhelming grey and dark and the captions often refer to specific characters. So unless you know a Jacob, most of these are not going to be of any use to you. And quite honestly, I don’t know why you’d want to encourage people to use a GIF that says “MURDERER ROT iN HELL”. Like, what is the postivie use case for this GIF? How does you brand look if people are using this GIF a lot?
Disney+ is faring better with 1.6 billion views from less than 600 GIFs, but again we have a mix of gifs that have a clear use case and some that are just a bit odd.
Focusing on WandaVision, we have some great expressions that convey so much emotion and are clearly immensely useful in many social situations.
However, we also have GIFs that are going to struggle to find a use. I’m not sure why anyone would want to use a gif of Vision changing his appearance, that abruptly ends before the transformation completes. It is tagged with “#GlowUp” but I remain unconvinced.
Schitt’s Creek is clearly far ahead of the game in terms of usability, style, captioning, and the use of discreet, but intentional branding.
However, where it falters is in its tag use. Disney+ is much better at using its tags to target specific searches and reaction use cases, while Schitt’s Creek GIFs are often just tagged with the show and the character. In some cases there are even spelling mistakes.
You would think this would hurt their views, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Although, we haven’t actually covered what a “view” on Giphy is. And it is a little unusual.
A view is counted every time a GIF has been served through GIPHY’s services or technology. A single view is counted when a GIF is served, regardless of how many times it loops. A GIF view on GIPHY is a sign of relevance, share-ability, and popularity.
So a view on Giphy does not mean a GIF has necessarily been used or downloaded, a “view” is simply an “impression”. If someone has done a search and a Schitt’s Creek GIF appears anywhere on that pages, that counts as view.
This may make the 5.5 Billion “views” Schitt’s Creek GIFs can claim sound a little less impressive, but it does tell us that they are showing up in searches more than all Disney+ shows combined.
Why might this be?
Because Giphy’s search is dumb as rocks.
If you search “sad robot” you will get gifs for “sad” and for “robot”, but you will not get the terms combined into a GIF of a robot that is sad. If you do a search for “Bad Robot” the same thing happens, and you get no results for the movie production company founded by J.J. Abrams. Google on the other-hand knows exactly what you meant.
Apparently, Disney+ and their superior tag use doesn’t help them as much as Schitt’s Creek long pedigree of more usable GIFs, and its perhaps this usability that is leading to them appearing in more searches. Only Giphy could tell us.
So why does this matter?
GIF keyboards are now commonplace. Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack all use Giphy for their GIF keyboard, and this is true for most messaging apps. Sometimes Giphy’s main competitor Tenor is used instead (Discord being one example) and that is a trend we may see increase in the wake of Facebook’s acquisition last year.
Whichever platform is powering the GIF keyboard matters little however, as many of the same GIFs are on both, and the search for all of them is equally terrible.
Therein lies the power of the now ubiquitous GIF keyboard.
People, and brands in particular, are often choosing one of the first 3–5 GIFs that show up in their search. With the GIF Keyboard so readily available, GIFs are increasingly being funnelled into a narrower and narrower subset.
Try this yourself: look up a brand on Twitter and look at their recently used GIFs. Try to guess what that social media manager would’ve searched for — “Applause” “Happy” “Yes” etc. — and search for that on the GIF keyboard in Twitter. Did you quickly find the same GIF they used?
And while we’re conducting this field experiment, did you also see a Schitt’s Creek GIF?
Now we can see the true power of Schitt’s Creeks GIFs.
Not only are their GIFs distinct to their brand while being easy and fun for people to use, but they are frequently appearing in searches on GIF Keyboards. And so both people and brands are regularly using a Schitt’s Creek GIF™️ across all of social media. This has propelled one show — not a network or streaming service — to 5.5 Billion views in GIFs alone.
You could say that the fact that Schitt’s Creek continues to be an award-winning comedy series is the reason for it’s GIF success. However, I would argue that their GIF marketing is clearly done with clear intent and intelligence that stands for itself.
You can’t deny it: Their GIF game is strong.
