Guest · Creativity and creative effectiveness
Kevin Hein
Chief Growth Officer, GIPHY
Kevin Hein is Chief Growth Officer at GIPHY, the platform through which 700 million people express themselves in private conversations every day. He leads the platform’s evolution from a search tool for GIFs into a genuine participant in the shift from feed-based social media to the messaging era.
About
Kevin Hein is Chief Growth Officer at GIPHY, where he leads sales, marketing, product, engineering, and strategic partnerships as the platform evolves beyond the feed into private and group messaging environments. GIPHY serves 700 million daily active users across messaging apps, social platforms, and keyboards worldwide.
Hein has spent his career at the intersection of consumer behaviour and brand expression, with experience across publishing, media, and technology. His move to GIPHY came at a pivotal moment: the platform had become ubiquitous as a GIF search tool but had not yet unlocked its potential as a brand expression channel in the messaging environments where more and more human communication now happens.
His work at GIPHY is built on a core insight: what people choose to send in a private conversation is a fundamentally different signal than what they engage with in a feed. The pause, the moment of reflection that leads someone to search for the right GIF, is a window into genuine emotional state. Brands that understand this can participate rather than interrupt.
Career21 years
- 2024 to now GIPHY (Shutterstock) Chief Growth Officer
- 2023 to 2024 NextRealm Consulting Group Principal Consultant
- 2018 to 2023 Meta Director, Head of Agency
- 2014 to 2018 Facebook US Industry Lead
Show earlier roles: Facebook, Yahoo!, CNET Networks
- 2010 to 2014 Facebook Client Partner
- 2007 to 2010 Yahoo! Strategic Account Director
- 2005 to 2007 CNET Networks Regional Sales Manager
How Kevin thinks3 convictions
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The shift from feed to messaging requires a completely different brand mindset
Feed-based environments are public, performative, and built for scroll. Messaging is private, intimate, and built for connection. Brands that apply feed-era tactics to chat environments misread the room. The party analogy is right: you do not walk into a group conversation and start yelling about your product.
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The pause moment is more powerful than the peak moment
GIPHY data consistently shows that the most shared content is not the obvious climax of a sporting event or the headline moment. It is the in-between moment, the reaction, the exhale. Brands that understand this build content around the full arc of an experience rather than just its peak.
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Brand value in messaging can be enormous even without a call to action
A soda brand drove measurable sales lift through GIPHY with zero offers, zero destinations, and zero CTAs. The mechanism was pure brand association through emotional expression. People chose to use the brand’s GIFs to communicate how they felt. That is earned presence in the most intimate medium there is.
