Instagram Doesn’t Have a Dislike Button, So Don’t Try to Dislike the Ads

You snap a picture of that beautiful sunset from the beach, add a nice Mayfair filter to it with a few clever hashtags and sit back and wait for your phone to light up with anticipation. As those 23 notifications pop-up from friends, family and the odd follower you’ve never met, you tend to love this moment, whether you care to admit it or not. Now, imagine how big your smile would be if you were on the team at Michael Kors who garnered over 220 THOUSAND likes from the first ever Instagram ad. Makes for a pretty happy day.

So, the question is then how much does it take away from the ad that 20% of the responses were negative? Not much.

As Users, We <3 Instagram

Despite a lot of complaints about the ads Instagram began running recently, the application is seeing success so far from the ads, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said at a conference in early November. The Michael Kors ads drew some complaints for their prominence in peoples’ news feeds, but they have also drawn “very positive comments,” including people recommending the advertised to friends and asking where they can get it

In fact, on a daily basis, there are 55 million photos uploaded to Instagram, with 12 thousand likes per second across all of these photos.  With a community of 150 million active monthly accounts, it isn’t a question of whether brands should layer Instagram advertising into their media budgets, but rather how and what each brand is going to do with this new opportunity.

An advertisement by definition is something that is shown or presented to the public to help sell a product or make an announcement. I believe that Instagram is bringing advertising back to its core, which involves attracting the consumer at initial glance, so much so for the consumer to want to retrieve more information on the product. With Instagram, there is no option to add in external links or upload via specific dimensions; you follow their structure and create something inside of that structure that your consumer will like.

The weight of Instagram’s success with advertising is up to the content producers. Instagram doesn’t have a repost feature so the original content is what is going to have to catch the eye of users on the application. As humans, we tend to not do so well with change. But as much as we miss the days of ad-less Instagram, as a consumer we are going to have to embrace it and make these a part of the work that we do with our clients.