The rarest thing that you’ll ever see on the internet is a second act. Things change quickly online; most brands only really get one run in the spotlight. But Tumblr isn’t most brands - even as new platforms have emerged and taken center stage within the culture of the internet, Tumblr’s influence and importance have continued to play an outsized role in defining what “online” looks like and feels like. They came to us to help bring their brand into the present day. We said “fuck yeah.”
We realized that we could find success by leaning into the problem we were being asked to solve - namely, that Tumblr had been around since forever. To most people, that meant Tumblr was old - but to us, it meant that Tumblr was a walking compendium of internet culture, a Library of Alexandria of the GIF era. So we reworked Tumblr’s presence across social to ladder back to Tumblr and the untold millions of receipts found all over their platform. We developed a series of creative wrappers for screenshots of Tumblr content which recast the greatest posts, notes, memes, and gifs in a more contemporary light - taking care to honor the original posters’ intent the whole way. And then we started mining the platform’s richest niches, surfacing content which plays very differently today than when it originally went up.
To date, we’ve doubled Tumblr’s engagement on both Twitter and Instagram while also getting some incredible co-signs from native users like Jacob Sartorius. But, honestly, the most important results were the 1:1 interactions we had from fans who couldn’t be happier to relive Tumblr’s greatest hits - both the ones who’d been there the first time around and younger audiences taking their first step into a larger world.
