Hulu wanted to give TV fans everywhere a special holiday gift. Something that would raise awareness for Hulu’s vast content library. As Hulu’s social media agency, we set out to create a unique and innovative digital experience.
In our brainstorming sessions, we realized that TV GIFs are the internet's native mode of expression. Hulu was in a unique position to offer the world a treasure trove of legally licensed GIFs taken from its collection of new and classic shows. This led to the idea of a sophisticated 'Perfect GIF Generator', which would pair users' tweets with a fitting TV GIF to help people express themselves during the holidays.
To power the experience, we created a database populated with thousands of GIFs from a wide swath of shows and applied hundreds of tags to capture the sentiment and context of each scene. As users typed their tweet into a box to tell us what they loved or hated about the holidays, an advanced natural language processing engine analyzed the contents of the user’s post to search for the best matching GIFs.
Overall, our primary goal with The Perfect GIF was to drive social sharing and advocacy for Hulu by creating an experience that was fun, compelling and easy to use. We also wanted to build awareness for Hulu's vast content library. To that end, we made sure that our extensive GIF library represented over 70 different TV shows. By the end of the campaign, social posts from the site garnered over 15k content shares, which contributed to 23 million social impressions and even a few "Hulu gets me" tweets.