Last but not least: Never GIF up

Technically outdated, but more popular than ever before: the GIF graphic format developed in 1987 is here to stay. More precisely: animated GIFs. The format allows several individual images to be saved in one file. Internet browsers play these as endless short animations. To prevent the file from becoming too unwieldy in size, the individual images are usually highly compressed, which in the age of HD and 4k makes for a pleasant trashy change in everyday visual life. Short scenes from YouTube videos - whether funny cats or foul-mouthed footballers - are immediately turned into GIFs and often edited with the simplest (and therefore iconic) effects. For example, there are what feels like 10,000 versions of Zidane's headbutt against Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final on the internet.

The popularity of the file format, whose correct pronunciation has been debated for years (gif vs. "tschif"), is now also being exploited in a campaign for the Fiat 500. Originally created for Tumblr Fiat GIFs were recently combined into a TV commercial under the claim "Endless Fun". The 30 seconds offer almost everything that popular web culture has to offer: Rainbows, cats, explosions, lasers, sloths, horse masks, robots and unicorns.

In the next step of the campaign, Tumblr users are invited to create their own Fiat GIFs. As Chrysler CMO Olivier Francois told Adweek.com explains, social media followers are trusted to create even better GIFs. The internet world may not know much about advertising, but it knows GIFs perfectly. And Fiat seems to feel at home on social media anyway: In the last few days, the Twitter profile of the Abarth 500 went viral. Under the motto "Too fast to follow", they boast that they have no followers. (hae)