A few weeks back, Instagram announced its intentions to start running ads on its platform and yesterday, it unveiled what those ads would look like.
In its blog post, Instagram announced that it was going to start running ads from only a handful of its partner brands, including adidas, Ben & Jerry’s, Burberry, General Electric, Lexus, Levi’s®, Macy’s, Michael Kors, PayPal and Starwood. It also made clear that user feedback on the ads was very important to the company and that if they didn’t like a particular ad, they could choose to hide them.
We want ads to be creative and engaging, so we’re starting with just a handful of brands that are already great members of the Instagram community. If you see an ad that doesn’t interest you, you can tap the “…” below it to hide it and provide feedback about what you didn’t like. This will help us show you more interesting ads in the future.
As an example, Instagram showed a picture of its own ad, which looks like this:
It also had an example of a Levi’s ad, which gives a better idea of what branded content will look like on the platform:
Of course, not everyone was happy, as can be seen from the user comments.
But ads are now a fact of life on social media platforms, and so far, Instagram seems to be doing it the right way, by making sure the branded content looks as good as the regular content and the ads aren’t intrusive to users. More importantly, the ads won’t use user’s images ala Google.
