Dive Brief:

• Imgur is an image sharing social media platform with 150 million active monthly users who are mostly male millennials, providing a very attractive place where brands can target that demographic.
• The platform helps brands be successful on Imgur by pairing advertisers with in-house creatives to ensure the messaging will resonate with Imgur’s audience.
• Imgur recently took promoted posts out of beta to offer them to all marketers and Old Spice was an early adopter with a campaign built around an animated GIF.

Dive Insight:

Imgur is a bit of niche social media platform in that its 150 million active monthly users are overwhelmingly male millennials, and marketers know it’s a venue where they can easily target that audience. The platform is based on image sharing, such as photos and GIFs, and users vote the content up or down rather than have “friends” or “followers” on Imgur. Steve Patrizi, vice president of marketing and sales at Imgur, says the platform is place where marketers can get new content in front of Imgur’s unique user base.

He told ClickZ, "We want to help people discover and share not just the best the internet has to offer and not just what their friends are sharing. We want to expose our community to more content and make sure it's really fun. We also want to ensure that users discover content that they may have otherwise not have done had they have just seen content that their friends share on other platforms."

One way Imgur makes sure marketers are successful on the platform is teaming advertisers with in-house creative talent that is largely hired from Imgur’s user base to tailor the messaging to Imgur’s audience. Part of the reasoning behind this partnering with brands is the Patrizi’s belief that millennials are very aware of marketing messages that aren’t created by other millennials.

And brands are taking advantage of Imgur’s promoted posts, recently taken out of beta and made available to all brands with an early GIF campaign from Old Spice, as well as a promotion from Starz for its new series, “Blunt Talk.”