I am a big fan of GIFs. They are short, funny, and engaging. Without pause, GIFs activate as soon as you scroll past one on the news feed, just begging for consumer attention. As a member of the millennial generation, a group that gladly accepts new social trends, my feeds are constantly clouded with GIFs shared between families and friends.

Yet with all my GIF experience, I’ve never seen a company optimize them to their advantage. Mountain Dew changed this.

 


This past Tuesday, Mountain Dew posted a GIF to Facebook and Twitter challenging users to fill in bottle outlines with Mountain Dew products by stopping and pausing the material at just the right time. What were people playing for? The simple satisfaction of stopping the video so that Mountain Dew drink and Mountain Dew drink outline matched up at exactly the right time- the perfect moment to screenshot the score and brag about it to friends.

What is so unbelievably brilliant is that Mountain Dew took the idea surrounding GIFs and made it something more. Matching up these Mountain Dew bottles became a game, a challenge the company was calling on its audience to accept. If people took on this challenge, they had the chance to brag to friends and family about how they “won” the GIF. If there’s anything humans love more than competition, it’s reveling in the glory that is a good win.

 


Mountain Dew took a simple bottle-matching GIF and made it a piece of content that consumers wanted to interact with. It became something searchable, shareable, and actionable. It’s moves like this in the marketing world that break through the clutter of the digital landscape and reveal the true victors.

On Tuesday, Mountain Dew won, but this win proves a point to all marketers looking to diversify campaigns. Can you create actionable material? Can you create content that diversifies the way people view your brand? Can you get consumers to take an action further than just scrolling past a GIF in the feed? Can you DEW it?!

Challenge accepted, Mountain Dew, challenge accepted.