#GIFTheFeeling

Submission 14,543

About

#GIFtheFeeling is a commercial hashtag launched by Coca-Cola as part of the company's "Taste The Feeling" marketing campaign. Following the launch of the promotional GIF maker in late January 2016, many Internet users began brandjacking the hashtag with custom animated GIFs featuring subversive or irreverent messages.

Origin

On January 19th, 2016, Coca-Cola launched its new global advertising campaign "Taste The Feeling" for promotion of all major Coca-Cola-branded beverages, Coca-Cola, Diet Coke and Coke Zero.

The campaign, which is the company's first ever marketing effort to advertise multiple Coke products under one unified slogan, replaces its long-running "Open Happiness" campaign launched in 2009 and features a new theme song “Taste the Feeling” by Australian pop singer Conrad Sewell.

#GIFtheFeeling

As part of its multimedia marketing campaign, the company launched a GIF generator microsite where people can create and share their own animated GIFs with custom messages "inspired by feelings of drinking a Coca-Cola." Officially launched on January 19th, the site takes the visitor through a two-minute interactive music video of "Taste The Feeling," during which the viewer can clip any scene as a three-second GIF using a toolbar of 32 emotions, add a personalized caption to express their own feelings and share it online with the designated hashtag #GIFtheFeeling.

Spread

On January 20th, 2016, Tumblr user Tehawesome^[5] posted an original compilation of his take on #GIFtheFeeling with humorously subversive captions, which garnered more than 28,000 notes in first ten days.

In the following days, several others on Tumblr and Twitter began sharing their own custom-captioned GIFs with the hashtag #GIFtheFeeling.^[3]^[13] On January 27th, The Daily Dot^[12] reported on Coca-Cola's GIF maker site and Tumblr user Tehawesome's post in an article titled "Coca-Cola gave millennials a 'GIF maker'--guess what happened next."