Recently, the creator of the “gif” image format brought attention, while accepting a Webby Award, to the correct way to pronounce it, with a soft “g.” Many people, myself firmly included, look at the spelling and understandably pronounce the word with a hard “g,” the better to underscore sentences such as “The next person to email me an animated gift is going to get such a smack.”
Creator of the GIF: "It is a soft 'G,' pronounced 'jif.' End of story." http://t.co/jOXN1Hgv3p
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 21, 2013
Not to be outdone, the makers of “Jif” peanut butter weighed in on the correct way to pronounce their product :
It's pronounced Jif® #Jif #GIF http://t.co/zJl0QMSdYS
— Jif® Peanut Butter (@Jif) May 22, 2013
That was clever and I laughed, but I can’t imagine there is a huge consumer audience for this issue, the way there was for the Superbowl when Oreo jumped on the blackout during the game to do a clever bit of “real-time marketing.”
Before you crown the new "real-time marketing king of the world" remember choosy mothers don't know what a gif is. Still, I laughed
— Doug Haslam (@DougH) May 22, 2013
Part of me (the evil, snarky part) hopes this was a setup to see who what social media gurus would declare Jif the new Real-Time Marketing King of the World, and thus expose themselves as idiots and/or frauds. That would be even more fun, though far less likely.
Perhaps next, the makers of White Cloud toilet paper can reach their all-important enterprise IT demographic by making a play on “Cloud Computing” in a Tweet (please tell me that hasn’t happened).
I’m all for having fun nd hope more brands do stuff like this, but I pry the people keep in perspective what these individual cation really mean.