Instagram Advertising

Definition  

Introduced in September 2015, Instagram advertising is a pay-for-placement system that allows brands to reach the social network’s users of the app with sponsored posts in their news feeds.

Background

According to the instructions of Instagram (2017), with Instagram ads, businesses can drive awareness of its business, product, app or service, and also increase product sales, mobile app downloads and visitors to the store once this kind of advertising uses algorithms to cross information and reach the target audience. The targeting is made through narrow options chosen by the businesses, such as location (states, provinces, cities or countries), demographic (age, gender and languages), interests that are analyzed though accounts users follows or apps downloaded by the users, and their behaviors based on the activities they do on and off Instagram.

After advertisers have published their advertisement campaign, the algorithms of the platform in question begin displaying the advertisements to the consumers whom they deem the most suitable². Advertisement targeting with algorithms is based on data created by the users as they use their devices. It is collected anonymously and helps in placing advertisements that match the users’ past behavior on the screen of a mobile device or computer.

Style of ads on Instagram

There are different types of Instagram advertising: one created by the company’s account by using photo, video, carousel and stories adverts. Businesses also decide the budget to spend and for how long the ads will run. The other one is conveyed by influencers who sponsor the products of a brand and openly declare the sponsored contents. These mainly differ from each other in the area of interactivity, media richness and vividness.

Company’s direct account

The Instagram ad appears in people’s Instagram feeds along with images and videos shared by their Instagram accounts. The first type of Instagram ad is photo advert, where a single image is used (the company has to choose the format, such as square, landscape and vertical format) in order to attract potential customers. The second type is video advert: it is usually a 30-second video which tells a story about the product. In the carousel advert, users can see additional images by scrolling back and forth the screen. Ads in Instagram stories provide a strong engagement thanks to either the upload of a personalized photo or a 15-second video that will appear in viewers’s stories for 24 hours only.So Instagram’s core lies in visualization.

Visual content and familiarity

Visuality and inspiring content make Instagram’s appeal. Brands are advised to aim for more stylized, atmospheric photos differentiating the content so that it can be recognized without the brand’s logo.

Big brands have an advantage on Instagram because of their reputation and brand familiarity that can cause an aroused feeling by means of the recognition effect. On the other hand, less familiar brands can extend their reach and awareness on Instagram through using video advertisements instead of photo advertisements.

Instagram Advertising Solutions provides brands with distinct objectives of visibility and engagement growth they can pursue with their ad campaigns². Given the rapid technological advancement and from the managerial standpoint, such online activity is crucial to companies as substantial amount of users can make decision through social networking communication, that has become a major communication method in contemporary society. As a mobile application that connect physical and digital realms, Instagram enhances online presence and identity, and allows more effective for business purposes.

Besides that, Instagram advertising improve brand familiarity among users and stimulate a positive consumer response because its highly vivid advertisements can improve consumers’ social endorsement to an online retailer, and thus offer support to the level playing field.

Risks

It can be hard for companies to be a brand on Instagram because Instagram hasn't launched any publishing-application-program interfaces. It means that posting remains a very manual process. Posts from the biggest brands are still published from a phone and can't be scheduled in advance. And brands can't tap into a third-party tool to gauge insights like the best time to publish and the best Instagram filters to use..

Some facts and statistics

Since its launch in 2010, Instagram has seen a steady rise in the user numbers, and today its global user base consists of 500 million Instagrammers. The demographic distribution of the users is also predominantly on the younger generations: 90% of users are under the age of 35.

Influencers as Instagram advertising intermediate

Instagram, as it is built on the interaction among people, offers to the brands the possibility to advertising their brand names or products through the figure of an intermediate, the so-called “Influencers”.

Influencer advertising or influencer marketing, is not a new phenomenon as it is based on the classical word-of-mouth recommendations, social media have simply brought their power into a wider digital approach. Instagram influencer advertising approach offers two main positive advantages.

Firstly, the mixture of people represented within the category of Influencer, expressing all kind of industry, field and niche, coming from all over the world, allows any brand to potentially get their targeted customers. Secondly, due to the high number of followers, influencers can with an insertion of the products in picture, video or in their daily Instagram stories, easily reach a massive audience. The confidence that followers have in these influencers and, consequently, on the products and services they use, convert influencer’s advertisement in a significant increase in sales and enhancement in the brand awareness.

Although there is not an International regulation on the relationship between the brand and influencer, there are unofficial practices to make this approach to succeed

1. Timeframe and the output with the deadline to meet.
2. The content usage rights of the influencers as creator of the content.
3. Payment through a free product/service/experience as part of that fee or a money paying.
4. Sponsored hashtag, both considering that regulations on sponsored content and the content of the message.

Regulation

Standards on branded content

Today, the so called “new natives” have to respect standards in order to publish branded content on the Social Media. “Branded content” is intended content created by an editor or someone who presents or is influenced by business partner for value trading. On Instagram, its have to be published only by Instagram accounts or profiles or other pages which have access to the instruments “Branded Content”. Using this instrument is possible to tag the product, the brand or the business partner of third parties showed.

Pages, Facebook profiles and Instagram accounts with the access to the instrument “Brand Content”, must comply with the following requirements:

1. Do not include pre-roll listing.
2. Do not include video or images banner.
3. Do not include titles between frames in the first three seconds of a video. Interstitial and units do not include the first three seconds of a video, such as intermediate and final units, should not last more than three seconds and should not be included in Facebook Stories or Instagram Stories.
4. Program pages should not include branded contents through the program or trailer logo.
5. Do not use the instrument “Branded Content” for tagging a Page, a brand or a business partner without prior consent.
6. All applicable laws and regulations must be complied with, including the communication of all information required by people using Facebook or Instagram as any statement necessary to indicate the commercial nature of the content being published.

Instafamous and the transparency rules: #ads

User-generated content influences more purchases than any other form of marketing. That’s the reason why this new tool has to be regulated in an appropriate manner.

From 1th March 2017, social media “influencers” have to clearly label their sponsored content also providing the hashtag “ads” under a photo, a video or every kind of sponsored content to show whether the post on Instagram feed has been paid for by a brand.

This phenomenon firstly started in Australia with a new code by the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) that covers all Social Media platforms and any kind of social media users.

See also

Abbott, W., Donaghey, J., Hare, J., & Hopkins, P. (2013). An Instagram is Worth a Thousand Words: An Industry Panel and Audience Q&A. Library Hi Tech News, 30(7), 1-6.

Bergstrom, T. & Backman, L. (2013). Marketing and PR in Social Media: How the unitilization of Instagram builds and maintains customer relationship. Media and Communication.

Carah, N and Shaul, M. (2015). Brands and Instagram: Point, tap, swipe, glance. In Sage Journals

Burke, M., & Edell, J. (1986). Ad Reactions over Time: Capturing Changes in the Real World. Journal of Consumer Research, 13(1), 114-118.

Ertemel, A. V and Ammoura, A. (2017). The Role of Social Media Advertising in Consumer Buying Behavior. The Role of Social Media Advertising in Consumer Buying Behavior. In International Journal of Commerce and Finance;2(1):81-90.

Jung, A-Reum (2017). The influence of perceived ad relevance on social media advertising: An empirical examination of a mediating role of privacy concern. In Computer in Human Behavior, Volume 70, Pages 303-309

Steuer, J. (1994). Vividness and Source of Evaluation as Determinants of Social Responses Toward Mediated Representations of Agency. Ph, D, dissertation, Stanford University.

West, Douglas C., Paliwoda, Stanley J. (1996). Advertising client‐agency relationships: The decision‐making structure of clients, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 30 Issue: 8, p.22-39.

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