From best‑kept secret to must‑consider.

What we heard.

Loved by people. A secret to buyers.

• The proof is real. 62 advertisers since 2024, 23 came back. Three Apple campaigns in one quarter. A 4% sales lift for Pepsi Blue Can. Hulu now always-on.
• But GIPHY is a sprinkle, not an ingredient. Buyers don’t know whether it belongs in social, search or display, and no one gets fired for leaving it off the plan.
• So every campaign starts from zero. Wins don’t compound into repeat, and pipeline depends on heroics.

Today, GIPHY is a platform buyers discover, not one they plan for.

We’ve been the platform.

At Meta, we sat in GIPHY’s seat: a platform people loved, that advertisers and agencies didn’t yet plan for. We built the creative team, the business marketing, the industry moments and the sales stories that changed that.

Original Model brings that experience to GIPHY as a creative intelligence studio built for B2B. We build what a business knows into a system, then use it to make work that’s smarter and unmistakably the client’s own.

We know the distance between a new ad capability and a line in the plan. Advertisers need a business argument. Agencies need the confidence to recommend it. Creative teams need to see what’s possible. Sellers need a story and proof. And every win needs to fuel the next one.

• Senior people do the work. The people in this proposal are the people on the account.
• One team with GIPHY’s. We work alongside Kevin, the new marketing hires, Sales and Alix’s creative strategy team.
• AI where it makes the work smarter, people where it matters. Research, synthesis and sales intelligence move faster. Taste, judgment and craft stay human.
• It gets smarter over time. Every conversation, campaign and result feeds a shared base of intelligence, so the second year is better than the first.

Platform builders.

Tom founded and led Creative Shop, Meta’s creative team for the world’s biggest brands, including Airbnb, HotelTonight, Expedia and Disney, and led business marketing for advertisers and agencies at Cannes Lions, Advertising Week and Meta’s global summits. Eric co-led Instagram’s first brand campaigns, including HotelTonight’s first-ever Instagram campaign.

B2B launch.

Aurora’s first driverless trucking platform needed to reach a small, skeptical business audience. We reframed the story from the company to the category with “Autonomy Delivers,” and built an integrated B2B campaign that converted into measurable sales leads. [Approved metric.] Next, we’re expanding it into Aurora’s brand platform.

Sales enabler.

Many teams were telling different stories in different rooms. We built the core narrative, then an enterprise-grade intelligence system inside Chase’s technology environment that prepares every conversation: the audience, the argument, the messenger. We’re now expanding the work to SMB programs nationally.

Accountable media.

Houston First wanted more from the paid media behind Comicpalooza, its flagship event. RSO found display spend with no attributable conversions and search spread too thin, then shifted budget to a campaign aimed at the exhibitor audience. The result: a 17.2x return on ad spend.

GIPHY’s marketing should be as creative as GIPHY.

Original Model’s founders have built brands people care about, across film, culture and business.

• Film and culture. An Emmy-nominated creative lead whose collaborators include David Lynch, Tim Burton, Paramount and the Paralympics, with work featured by the Criterion Collection.
• Award-winning platform work. More than 20 campaigns recognized at Cannes Lions, the Effies and other industry forums, made with the world’s biggest brands at Meta’s Creative Shop.
• Brand building at scale. “It’s Your World,” the launch of Meta’s business brand, drove statistically significant gains in brand perception and generated incremental revenue.
• Cultural comebacks. Strategy that helped reestablish Snapple as a cultural icon and turned years of sales decline into double-digit growth.

The real problem.

GIPHY isn’t losing on results. It’s losing on planning.

• Buyers don’t know where GIPHY fits. Social, search, display or innovation? Without a budget home, GIPHY becomes an exception.
• Too many people have to say yes. Brand, creative and media teams each own part of the decision, and any one of them can stall it.
• The first buy feels like extra work and personal risk. A new vendor, new process and non-standard reporting, for a line that isn’t required. And if a new platform underperforms proven channels, the person who backed it is exposed.
• Champions can’t defend the second buy. Results often don’t reach next year’s budget owner, so the person who took the risk has nothing to point to.

Some hurdles are product realities, like targeting and tracking on partner surfaces. Our first job is to sort which barriers marketing can solve, which need Sales, and which depend on Product, then position around what GIPHY does that no one else can.

How GIPHY gets bought.

GIPHY isn’t on the standard media plan yet, and it won’t win a line by competing with Meta, Google and programmatic on their terms. So we hunt where the industry is already open: an appetite for culturally driven storytelling, a willingness to try new approaches, and the added value that sweetens bigger deals.

Three doors in, and three ways to multiply.

• Brand plans: launches, tentpoles and cultural moments, where the goal is relevance and emotional connection.
• Test-and-learn budgets: the share of spend big advertisers set aside for new channels, like Coca-Cola’s 70/20/10.
• Added value in larger deals: bonus delivery that puts GIPHY in the plan and sets up a paid line next time.

The multipliers: agencies (one planner brings many brands), brand portfolios (one proven brand opens its sisters) and partner platforms (GIPHY as the expressive layer on other campaigns).

From sprinkle to essential ingredient.

Other platforms place brands next to content. GIPHY puts brands inside what people say to the people who matter most to them, in the conversations specific to each brand’s audience, category and world: game day for a sports brand, premiere night for a streamer, a new flavor for a snack.

Our hypothesis: a brand invited into its audience’s cultural conversation is more powerful than a brand interrupting their feed.

The early evidence:

• It gets chosen, not just seen. Out of everything they could send, people pick the brand’s content. That’s a stronger signal than any impression.
• It travels on trust. Every send is a personal endorsement to a friend, carrying the brand further than the media buy.
• It moves the business. A 4% sales lift for Pepsi Blue Can, and in GIPHY’s own studies, lifts in tune-in for entertainment and in brand recommendation.

In a market full of ads people skip, GIPHY is where people choose the brand.

Discovery will test it: whether brand leaders and media planners believe it, which proof moves each of them, and how it holds up against proven channels. Then we build it into a positioning platform, tagline and voice.

GIPHY’s B2B marketing should behave like GIPHY: human, expressive, unexpected, culturally fluent.

We’ll get there in three steps: discover and deepen (test the hypothesis with buyers, agencies and GIPHY’s own evidence), develop and refine (a positioning platform, tagline options and messaging), and codify and activate (guidance that carries it into the site, sales tools, media and moments).

Making what’s new easy to buy.

GIPHY’s new ad solutions, measurement capabilities and partnerships each need a story buyers understand on first read. For every launch:

• A narrative that ladders up to GIPHY’s positioning.
• A launch kit: a sales one-pager, an agency brief, a site page, and a LinkedIn and trade announcement.
• Proof planned in: an early customer or pilot to tell the story with.

First up: [self-serve, new measurement capabilities and partner programs, as GIPHY’s 2027 roadmap allows].

Find the few who decide.

GIPHY’s buyers are a concentrated U.S. audience: brand and marketing leaders, social media managers, paid media managers, and media planners and buyers at target accounts and the agencies behind them. RSO puts the platform in front of them all year.

• Built for a small audience. LinkedIn matched to GIPHY’s target accounts, account-based programmatic, and trade titles where planners read, like Adweek, Ad Age and Digiday.
• Always on, with bursts. A steady baseline, plus bursts around Cannes, Advertising Week and the brand planning windows when next year’s budgets are set.
• Measured in sales outcomes. Engaged accounts, meetings and proposals, tracked in GIPHY’s CRM.

[RSO: flighting chart and channel split in dollars.]

No markups. RSO’s fee isn’t a percentage of spend, so recommendations are never tied to spending more.

Buyers ask AI. GIPHY should be the answer.

Planners and strategists now research with ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI results. When someone asks how to reach people inside conversations, or how to make a brand part of culture, is GIPHY named? Today, no one is measuring that. We will.

1. Ask what buyers ask. Build a library of real planner and marketer questions.
2. Measure monthly. Track whether GIPHY is named and how it compares.
3. Close the gaps. Strengthen the sources AI cites: ads.giphy.com, case studies, trade coverage.
4. Report it quarterly, alongside paid media results.

Celebrate the people who make brands part of culture.

[Working name]

Adoption accelerates when creative people start imagining what a platform can do. GIPHY can become the place the industry celebrates the agencies, creatives and brands that use expression to connect. A few ways it could come to life:

• The profiles: short films and stories on the people behind GIPHY’s best brand work.
• The showcase: a curated moment at Cannes for expressive brand work.
• The recognition: an annual honor for the most expressive brand work of the year.
• The challenge: creative agencies invited to imagine what their brands could say on GIPHY.

It strengthens agency relationships, creates content all year, and shows GIPHY’s creative possibilities better than any ad.

An ad site built to convert.

Today it’s a single lead form. It should show what’s possible, prove it works and make the next step obvious.

1. Audit: positioning, content, UX, technical performance, analytics and conversion paths.
2. Architecture and messaging: products, packages, proof by vertical and an agency section.
3. Design and build: responsive, within GIPHY’s technology environment, with analytics, lead routing and QA.
4. Launch in Q2, then optimize monthly.

KPIs: site-to-inquiry conversion, qualified inquiry rate, time from inquiry to first meeting, and content engagement, reported in the monthly scorecard. A focused refresh, not a platform rebuild.

Driving inbound demand.

Inbound deals close fastest, in as little as three weeks.

We’ll build a path that turns interest into qualified conversations:

• Be found. Search for advertiser-intent queries, and visibility in AI answers when buyers research where to spend.
• Give buyers a reason to raise a hand. First-buy offers, cultural intelligence reports and vertical case studies, through LinkedIn lead forms and the site.
• Convert on the site. Clear products, proof by vertical and a short path to a meeting.
• Route fast. Every inquiry scored against a definition of “qualified” agreed with Sales, and in a seller’s hands quickly, with a follow-up standard Sales sets.

Inbound draws on every part of the program: paid media to be found, content to raise a hand, the site to convert and the toolkit to follow up. Sellers get a modular toolkit to follow up: core decks, vertical stories, explainers and objection handling.

We report qualified inquiries and the meetings they produce, not raw lead counts.

The first buy, made easy.

A brand’s first campaign on GIPHY should be the easiest yes in the plan, and the start of the second.

• Clear options. Two or three packaged first campaigns, sized for test-and-learn budgets, with creative support from GIPHY Studios.
• Proof built in. A funded lift study on every first-buy campaign, so the champion walks away with results they can defend.
• A path to paid. A results meeting before planning season and a recommended next campaign, so the first buy becomes a line in the plan.

Economics, eligibility and incentives are set with Sales, Product and Finance, funded from the $125K first-buy line.

Help every champion defend the second buy.

The person who bought GIPHY took a risk. Most of the time, they have nothing to show their boss when next year’s budget is set. We’ll change that.

Every campaign ends with an impact story built for the champion: the results, the creative, what people did with it, in a format they can share with their CMO. A results meeting lands before planning season, and a renewal plan connects to their calendar and their sister brands.

Repeat buying gets designed into the program, not left to chance.

A test we can run in Q1.

GIPHY as the expressive layer on partner-platform campaigns.

Partner with a platform like Reddit and one brand. GIPHY builds the creative, the partner contributes impressions, and we compare results with and without the GIPHY layer. It’s low cost, fast to read, and proves the partner-multiplier story early.

Honest attribution. Clear targets.

We’ll show what marketing caused, what it influenced, and what we can’t yet see.

• Baseline first. 62 advertisers since 2024, 23 returning (37%), average deal about $70K. We validate these with Sales and Finance in December and set 2027 targets against them.
• The bar. At a $70K average campaign, $1M equals about 14 campaigns in gross billings, before margin. Our model shows conservative, base and upside scenarios, separating new revenue from repeat and expansion.
• The Q4 decision. In the first 30 days we agree with Kevin on what “working and able to scale” must show by Q4, and report against it every month.
• Where tracking falls short, first-party lift studies and buyer research fill the gaps. Marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced revenue are reported separately.

Senior leadership across strategy, creative and media.

• Tom Brown, Co-founder, Strategy. 25+ years at the intersection of storytelling, strategy and technology, including 14 at Meta, where he founded Creative Shop and led business marketing for advertisers and agencies. Co-founded a nationally distributed CPG brand; taught marketing strategy at Columbia.
• Eric Oldrin, Co-founder, Creative. Emmy-nominated director with 25+ years at the edge of emerging technology, from Macromedia to Meta, with partners like David Lynch, Tim Burton, Paramount and the Paralympics.
• Kerri Wells Wane, Account Lead. 15+ years in B2B marketing. At Meta, led global business marketing and sales enablement for the company’s largest advertiser program across 56+ markets. At 360i, helped grow the social practice to 70+ people for P&G, Unilever and NBC Olympics.
• Rob Sanders, Founder, RSO. Founded RSO in 2006; leads paid media, measurement and AI analytics, with deep expertise in Google Ads, GA4 and attribution tied to the CRM.
• Lucia Rodas-Estrada, Media Lead, RSO. A decade building search, social and demand programs for B2B and B2C brands, including nearly eight years leading B2B search at DWA/Merkle.
• Producer and project manager: [Name]. Specialists join when the work calls for them: research, copywriting, design and motion, film, web UX and development, and analytics. GIPHY pays for craft when it needs it, not for a standing bench.

One team. With a reflex for what’s next.

[Team diagram: GIPHY’s team at the center; Kerri as the single point of accountability; Tom and Eric hands-on every week; producer and project manager; RSO on media; specialists as needed.]

• Clear ownership. GIPHY owns priorities, budget, product and sales conversion. We own the integrated plan, creative and execution within the agreed scope.
• A steady rhythm. Weekly working sessions with GIPHY’s marketing hires and Alix’s team, a monthly performance review with Kevin, and a quarterly strategic assessment.
• The Monday-morning brief. When something big happens over a weekend, Kevin has a brief by Monday morning: what happened, why it matters, what we recommend.
• Ideas we bring, not wait for. We flag opportunities and recommend action before we’re asked.

Why Original Model.

• We’ve done this exact job. Turning platforms people love into platforms buyers plan for.
• We make sales stronger, not just louder. One story, told well in every room.
• We make GIPHY look like GIPHY. Creative as expressive and culturally fluent as the platform itself.

Ready to start in November.

1. Kickoff with GIPHY leadership, Sales, Product and marketing: confirm the brief, decision rights and scope.
2. Access to commercial data, campaign results, research and brand assets.
3. Agree on priority accounts and the Q4 success bar.
4. Begin discovery and creative platform development.
5. Finalize the 2027 calendar, measurement framework and agreements.

The first 90 days build the foundation and put GIPHY in market.

Let’s make GIPHY impossible to leave off the plan.