How GIF Fest and Facebook rewrote what a story can be

The Next Story, Facebook/Instagram

The Challenge

Storytelling was changing, and the next wave of storytellers weren’t behind fancy cameras or heavy typewriters. They were on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, creating new ways to tell stories for today’s mediums.

Creative agencies, however, were slow to adapt to this change. They were still doing things the same old ways. Widescreen was their default, and 30 seconds was as short as they were willing to go. How could we change this mindset?

The Opportunity

To inspire creative agencies with the potential of its increasingly popular feature, Stories, Facebook partnered with Noise GIF Fest—a unique creative festival that celebrated the shortest format of them all, the mighty GIF.

We took over the festival by partnering with creators to showcase innovative uses of typical Stories elements like stickers, augmented reality filters, and of course, vertical storytelling. To kick-off the event, we hosted an industry night and invited top creatives from Singapore’s biggest agencies to attend.

The Creators

We chose 4 unique Instagram creators to help us tell The Next Story.

US-based animator Marty Cooper (@hombremcsteez), known for “aug-dementing reality”, created custom sticker projections that interacted with the event environment. Filmmaker, Martin Hong (@choann_studio), and French design collective, Parallel Studio (@parallel_studio_), showcased their “tall-shorts” in a custom built vertical cinema. Local artist duo, Kapilan Naidu (@kapilan.naidu) and Darryl Lim (darryl.in.distress), designed a “Magic Mirror” to inspire people with the possibilities of AR.

The Campaign

After GIF Fest, we used content filmed during the event to run a Facebook & Instagram Stories campaign.

Swiping up on any of the campaign ads took the viewer to an Instant Experience where they could watch the full video and learn more about the artist’s approach to shortform storytelling.

The Results

Roughly 5.4K people attended GIF Fest over 5 days. Of those who attended the Industry Night, 70% agreed that Facebook/Instagram Business provides an effective platform for storytelling, 73.68% agreed that creative ideas can be showcased on the Facebook/Instagram platform, and 90% said they would recommend attending GIF Fest (Industry night) to others.

The digital campaign, which ran on a minimal budget reached 115k people, with 31K completed views an 2.1K link clicks.