In this Marketing Over Coffee:

Learn about the Art, Business, Culture of GIFs and more!

<iframe loading="lazy" style="border: none;" title="Embed Player" src="https://play.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/32107037/height/192/theme/modern/size/large/thumbnail/yes/custom-color/a15e0e/time-start/00:00:00 /playlist-height/200/direction/backward/download/yes/font-color/FFFFFF" width="100%" height="192" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>

Direct Link to File

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, anywh