Insights

Turn your GIFs interactive with YoYo

Over the past few years, animated GIFs have taken over the internet. They’re everywhere, from Twitter and Tumblr to Reddit and Buzzfeed, and are used to convey opinions, create amusement or capture a moment. While GIF creation used to be reserved for those who knew their way around Paint Shop Pro, now there are websites and apps that make it easy for even the technophobes among us to turn videos and images into GIFs. For those, like us, working in digital marketing, it’s a fun new form of video marketing that really appeals to the online audience of 2015.

Now that GIFs are an established form of online content, we’ve been looking at ways to make your GIFs stand out. Perhaps you could call this the GIF 2.0 era? One great way to make more exciting, engaging GIFs is to use an app such as YoYo to create interactive animations. Using YoYo, you can design a GIF that changes as the cursor moves over it. This allows the viewer to manipulate the animation, so they can watch it move in the direction and at the speed of their choice. Creating a YoYo is extremely simple: just paste a link to an existing GIF (or a web page featuring a GIF) into the YoYo website, and your YoYo is created and added to your profile in just 30 seconds.

We recommend checking out the YoYo website to browse a range of examples, showing the variety of different ways the app can be used. We invite you to check out our YoYo’s. The results can be hilarious, for example when you watch a GIF in reverse and see a baby elephant running backwards. It can also be beautiful, as you can pause at every stage of a water balloon explosion, creating a series of unique images. Others have used YoYo for educational purposes; for example, it’s an interesting way of presenting a graph or chart. Maybe you could use a YoYo GIF when you next make a presentation? It would certainly be more memorable and entertaining for your clients.

In the words of YoYo themselves, “GIFs are so 2014.” It’s time to move on and implement new types of visual content to prove that you’re one step ahead. If you want to attract customers with a fun, creative digital marketing campaign, using innovative ideas like interactive animations, talk to us at iFactory about digital strategy. We’d love to get involved and create a bespoke digital marketing strategy and campaign for you that will bring your brand into the new digital world.

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