(screencap from What Should We Call Girls)

A couple weeks back, Betabeat noted that Cinemax had embarked on a GIF-happy marketing campaign for its new show, Banshee, which seemed like a heavy-handed marketing campaign for a heavy-handed show.

Well, if releasing the entire first episode in GIF format seemed a bit overwrought—”the GIF format has emerged as a popular visual language across the internet and provides a creative way into social conversations by leveraging existing online behaviors,” a marketing exec at HBO (Cinemax’s parent company) told us—at least the GIFs were cool.

If only we could say the same thing for What Should We Call Girls, the network’s Tumblr for its hit show Girls, which was a perfectly reasonable idea executed with a preponderance of rules, including:

GIFs should feature images from the HBO series GIRLS only

GIFs should not combine GIRLS content with any other content or material

Any text in your GIF must be a direct quote from GIRLS

All GIRLS content in GIFs must be obtained from authorized sources of HBO programming

GIFs should be approximately 5 seconds long

We reserve the right to select the GIFs that will be posted on this site

All of which made inevitable masterpieces such as this one:

Does that mean HBO is the Adam Driver of networks? “You should never have to be anyone’s fucking slave. Except mine.”

Follow Patrick Clark on Twitter or via RSS. pclark@observer.com