Everyone Wants GIF Booths
By Gavin Lawrence
We’ve supplied GIF booths in 5 states across Australia and their popularity is quite staggering right now. Although you lose image quality once you convert photos to animated GIFs, the strike power once they hit social media more than makes up for it.
Some of the brands that have requested GIFs in the past few months are Red Bull, Chemist Warehouse, Vaalia, Coca-Cola, Foxtel, Sandro Paris, V Energy Drink, Pandora, DON and Perpetual.
From our experience, 99% of people pronounce it GIF (including us), but it’s actually pronounced “JIF”. The G is said the same way you’d say Gerry. GIF stands for Graphic Interchange Format and was developed by Steve Wilhite in 1985. His frustration of the incorrect pronunciation worldwide still lingers. I guess it would be like everyone calling Google, Joogle. LOL.
Just like with photos and videos, it’s easy to add branding, design and text as an overlay but the beauty with GIFs is that you can add a different overlay to each individual frame, making it truly animated and eye-catching. You’ll see what we mean with the Vaalia GIF above. For that activation, we added 4 overlays to each GIF and gave shoppers along the east coast the option of 5 GIF styles, to match their vitality. 20 overlays in all was the first of it kind, we think.
One of the great features of choosing a GIF booth from Blue Steel, is that you can have as many photos as you want for each GIF, although the norm is 3 or 4. As well as having an awesome GIF that you can post straight to your favourite social media via the iPad stand next to the booth, you can also request for the photos to be printed, like you would with a regular photo booth. People of all ages love the tech of GIFs as well as something they can touch and take home or to the office to put on their real wall. See some examples below. We can also change the speed of the GIFs depending how fast or slow you want them. We’d recommend going with 3 frames per second or 4 if you want them a bit faster.
