Beauty brands have found a new and innovative way to utilise Instagram Stories. You might have noticed over the last week or so that a number of brands have uploaded their own GIFs into Instagram's library of looped video clips and stickers. A basic search for makeup will now yield results of animated cosmetics from the likes of M.A.C, Dior, Mecca Max and most recently, Benefit.
US website Glossy reports that cosmetics companies are turning to Instagram GIFs in an effort to get younger consumers' attention, and keep it. According to the site: "[Benefit] began to see a “vast shift” in attention from its Snapchat account to its Instagram stories at the end of 2017. Today, the average open rate for a Benefit Cosmetics Instagram Story is roughly 4 percent, nearly a full percentage higher than the median open rate of fellow beauty accounts with over a million followers (Benefit has 7.7 million followers.)"
Benefit’s social media manager Angela Purcaro told Glossy that in a short-lived test launch with a select group of influencers, the Benefit-branded GIFs reached millions of users through Stories. That kind of reach, she said, has led Benefit’s marketing team to believe this will be among its most successful brand awareness initiatives to date.
And it's not just businesses who are using GIFs as a branding tool. Following Kim Kardashian's 2016 KIMOJI collective, a number of influencers have created their very own animations including the likes of Tanya Burr, Cartia Mallan and Cass Sersemis.
Sersemis told BEAUTYDIRECTORY that she predominantly wanted her YouTube video intros to look exciting and more professional with the addition of animation. How she did it? Via Instagram of course. Michael Rusakov, a visual artist based in New York, specialises in creating animated stickers and unsurprisingly has over 80k followers himself on Instagram.
While Rusakov will likely reap the benefits of this influencer-friendly digital trend for the foreseeable future, bigger businesses will probably turn to GIF creator company GIPHY, just as Benefit did. Glossy reports that GIPHY is estimated to be worth around US$600 million, plus it has 300 million daily users and thousands of corporate partnerships across platforms. It's thought that the company is also making a concerted effort to reach out to beauty industry insiders as companies like Benefit turn to GIFs in an effort to target a younger generation. Moreover, while Instagram is currently at the centre of most GIF strategies, the continuously looped video clips or animations will soon be available across GIPHY-compatible platforms including SMS, Tinder and Slack.
Image: @cassersemis
Newsletter image: @michael.ny
