I could see them being a clear buyer here. Some of the GIFs in that article are clear, in-your-face ads, but some of the others are a bit more subtle... yet still probably achieve Starbucks' ad goals.
As for Giphy reach... I use Giphy on Facebook Messenger, Discord, and probably a few other places that I'm unaware of. They hook into a LOT of places.
"hook into a LOT of places" - That optimism isn't well supported by acquisitions and IPOs in recent years. I maintain that the "pop-culture-image sharing" craze, which obviously includes gifs, hit its monetary-value peak when Yahoo bought Tumblr in May 2013 for $1.1B. It's been more than 4 YEARS since then, and what goin' on with Pinterest? I mean they are now 7 years into their existence and have neither IPO'd nor been acquired. Meanwhile, Imgur keeps chugging along--though downward, and since Reddit began hosting its own images, Imgur's decline has only accelerated, as even the Google Trends popularity graph reflects [0].
VIDEO is the future, and with AR, VR, and mixed reality on the rise (where the Almighty Facebook's Oculus is actually 5th place in sales [1]), images and gifs are looking about as exciting as innovations in the design of mobile flip phones. Snap, with Snapchat, went public earlier this year, but I don't think they ever could have done if they remained merely a photo-messaging app, rather than a photo-and-video messaging app, as well as a news-publishing app and now a TV app with its own proprietary programming.
Didn't we learn from Zynga that a business can never be truly successful when it completely depends on the participation of partners to have any successes. Facebook could decide tomorrow that they no longer want to give Giphy the power that they do, and completely destroy them no?
I use Giphy daily, multiple times a day, on Slack. Unless Slack is paying a hefty SaaS fee to Giphy for use of their platform, I don't know how else they'd monetize it.
I could see them being a clear buyer here. Some of the GIFs in that article are clear, in-your-face ads, but some of the others are a bit more subtle... yet still probably achieve Starbucks' ad goals.
As for Giphy reach... I use Giphy on Facebook Messenger, Discord, and probably a few other places that I'm unaware of. They hook into a LOT of places.