This simple-but-elegant image, recently posted to Instagram, is the start of something special. It represents Instagram’s answer to the throngs of investors, geeks, journalists, and executives who, since day one, have been asking “how will it make money?”
The answer, like this photo — and like Instagram’s entire product philosophy — is also simple but elegant: Instagram is a place to find beautiful visual content, and ads are just certain beautiful content that somebody is paying to amplify. Whether you’re Joe Schmoe or General Electric, most people care only about how awesome your content looks and how it conveys a feeling or aesthetic that they want more of.
A sizeable portion of the Instagram community actually follows more non-friends than friends on the social network, thus the platform is ripe for brand engagement. If a brand sends me great photos, I really don’t care if they paid money or not to reach me. I only care about the quality of the content, and that’s a testament to the simultaneously UX focused but brand-friendly usage patterns Kevin Systrom and Co. have carefully fostered over the years.
But what if I don’t like the quality of this sponsored content, or just hate the brand? There’s a simple button in the lower-left to give feedback and hide the ad. The strategy here is to start simple and clean, dip a toe in the water, collect usage data, and iterate to taste. Due to the nature of Instagram’s aesthetic and usage patterns, brands are intrinsically incentivized to provide interesting and engaging photos – this is very likely why the company is only introducing this product as a closed beta with just a handful of advertisers. It will be interesting to see how they ensure high-quality ad content.
And when they’re ready to open the floodgates, Facebook can provide myriad best practices and existing infrastructure to properly handle auctions, targeting, long-term attribution data, and analytics. Perhaps much of that Instagram ad performance data can also be piped back into Facebook’s own Ads platform in a virtuous cycle.
So what did we learn today? The best advertising is the type of content that doesn’t feel like it’s selling something. At least for the near term, Instagram doesn’t have to do anything groundbreaking, aggressive, or brilliant in their initial ads foray. Their brilliant move has already been in the making for 3 years, simply in the creation of a platform where ads aren’t ads. They’re content.
This is my final guest blog post for Thismoment. It’s been 3 wonderful years, and I can’t wait to see what amazing things TM accomplishes in the next 3 years while I watch from afar.
