The death of originality..
Being original is cool right? I mean who doesn’t want to be the next David Cameron or pop sensation Justin Bieber. As a population we love original ideas, thoughts and processes, so why not love something that thrives on its originality?
Successful companies stay afloat due to being original (among other reasoning) and use this to their advantage through the wave of nostalgic adverts we see on media today. Being retro is ‘cool’.
I’m not saying that being original is the only way of surviving in this vicous world, but it does help quite a lot. Take Coca Cola for example, they are horrendously original. The ever popular Christmas advert has been on air for years and has become moulded to the idea of being in the ‘Christmas spirit’. This is one of the many ways Coca Cola use their original marketing campaigns to keep them in the consumers mind.
So what causes companies to steer clear of being ‘original’? among other things, its mainly to stay ahead of the competition. It’s about being the best of the best, and well sometimes being original, doesnt quite cut it.
Now the heated topic, Instagram.
Instagram unvieled this week that it was going to be making drastic changes to the algorithm on a users feed. In simple terms, your feed is going to look very different.
See at the minute a users feed flows in chronological order (which makes sense right?) So the newest posts will appear first and so on. Which is lovely because you can see a photo of your relitives cat as soon as its posted, woop!
But instead of seeing your beloved feline on top of your Mum’s feed, you will now see the most popular post. So your likes are finally coming into use..
This now does now mean that your home page will be filled with Kardashian selfies, Celebrity endorsed products and a mixture of photos of others peoples food (wow, fun).
It has caused an outrage in the ‘Insta’ community, people are now encouraging their followers to ‘turn on the post notifications’ in their settings to keep them up to date with their latest posts.
So, why?
Money. Money is the answer.
Instagram hasn’t always placed adverts between posts on the home page, there was a time before featured photos. It’s only recently that Instagram has done this, the reasoning is lack of adverts, companies weren’t able to sell on the app, and advertisers struggled to advertise (obvious, I know)
In simplistic terms, Instagram wasn’t making any money and needed to make some dosh to survive. Give them their due, Instagram has done a good job with keeping the featured posts less intrusive and hasn’t caused a huge upset.
But… theres still room to make even more money here.
See the idea of this new update is to change the way people view Instagram, it will no longer be about pretty pictures and filters. It will be about numbers and stats.
To an investor, Instagram has the capability to reach a massive audience, to be exact there is currently 400,000,000 active Instagram users worldwide. Those are ridiculous numbers. That is huge amount of people in essentially one place. A gold mine to any advertiser.
So why not place all of your most popular ‘Instagrammer’s’ on the top of the food chain?
Most celebrities use Instagram and post selfies almost daily. Some attracting hundreds of thousands of likes.
Simple economics come into play, lots of likes, lots of people.
Therefore Instagram will see this and dollar signs will roll in their eyes.
But unfornatenly for us, the enthustasic, coffee loving ‘grammars’, our lovely Instauniverse gets ruined.
But as JF Kennedy said “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future”.
