The PR profession must embrace visual storytelling.
How’s that for a declarative sentence that leaves nothing to interpretation?
We’ve discussed visual elements ranging from infographics to video to illustrations.
It’s now time to turn our attention to the humble GIF (graphics interchange format), perfect for short-form storytelling. If GIFs are good enough for BuzzFeed, which has perfected the format as click candy, it certainly deserves a place in the PR arsenal.
The simplicity of GIFs – they typically run less than 10 seconds in an endless loop – also make them ideal for contrasting the old way with the new way, a technique Yahoo used in showing off its latest site design.
For communicators, GIFs allow you to squeeze another digital asset out of existing content. I believe it was Larry Ellison who said, “You can never be too rich, too thin or have too many digital assets.”
You can see how this plays out in the real world. We designed a quarter-page ad on storytelling to run in directories. We then took this creative and pieced together a GIF called “Storytelling in Seven Seconds” (technically the visual below is not GIF to make it “playable).
Using tools such as Adobe Illlustrator and Photoshop, our designer Samantha Lim put this together in roughly 3 hours.
At the next level, GIFs can serve as a campaign extender, which you see in the second example below supporting our “Just Say No To Corporate Speak” campaign.
Again, visual storytelling makes it easy for the viewer to consume.
Virtually every campaign can benefit from GIFs and what I come to call micro storytelling.
P.S. If you enjoyed this post, check out “Six Sources To Inspire Your Visual Storytelling Side.”