GIPHY is growing up.
The search engine for GIFs is partnering with Oracle Data Cloud’s Moat to measure viewability, ad delivery and invalid traffic for short-form branded content on its platform.
The metrics will be baked into the price of media and available for all campaigns and sponsored GIFs starting in Q4 when GIPHY and Moat wrap up their QA testing. Because the environment is so new for advertisers, it’s hard for brands to value GIPHY inventory in comparison with other channels. There are no measurement benchmarks for GIFs yet.
And advertisers need assurances to spend, said Alexis Berger, GIPHY’s VP of revenue. Invalid traffic, for example, isn’t an issue on the platform, but that doesn’t mean advertisers don’t ask about it.
“The industry likes to be able to measure everything apples to apples, so we want to be able to provide that,” she said. “And it’s always better not to grade your own homework.”
Measuring GIFs isn’t all that different from measuring other forms of media, but there are some nuances.
GIFs, for example, are made to be shared. Does a share count the same as a GIF that shows up in GIPHY search? How do organic shares get counted?
During the life of a campaign, each share will be treated as a separate impression and a fresh opportunity to serve viewable content. Advertisers will only be charged the first time a GIF loads and is 100% viewable.
Any additional shares of branded GIFs after a campaign completes will be considered free earned media. But being able to measure it will help GIPHY prove the additional benefit.
“GIFs can capture a lot of consumer attention organically, and advertisers want to be able to quantify that value,” said Mark Kopera, head of product at Moat. “At the same time, most of the largest brands and agencies are moving to transacting on valid and viewable as the baseline metric across all platforms.”
Because the integration with GIPHY is still so new, Moat isn’t putting it through a Media Rating Council accreditation process yet, although Kopera said it’s something they might explore together down the line.
Hooking up with Moat is a “big step forward” for GIPHY’s budding advertising business, said Berger, who noted that GIPHY also starting running studies with Nielsen this year to measure affinity and lift metrics, including purchase intent and recommendations.
“It’s still early days for us in terms of building out our measurement and analytics,” Berger said. “But we’re starting to put the guardrails in place.”
