Instagram Story Ads Are Garbage and It’s Not All Facebook's Fault

So here’s what we know is happening over in Facebook land

Shortly after Facebook released their Q2 reports showing user growth (specifically DAU’s) that looked remarkably similar to a massive drawing of a zero, everyone hopped on the Cheddar and HLN streams to watch the biggest loss of revenue in a company’s history.

And it dropped REALLY fast.
Like 20% in a few hours kind of fast that lost them 120 billion in market capitalization.

According to Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg, “GDPR has not had a significant revenue impact, but we recognize there are still risks. Advertisers are still adapting to those changes. One thing we know that’s not going to change is advertisers are looking for the highest ROI opportunity.”

We also have seen Facebook pumping ads into so many aspects of the platform such as Marketplace, Messenger, and of course News Feed that they are dangerously close to running out of ad inventory across the platform in general.

Today brought another revelation to light about how Facebook feels about publishers when a senior Facebook executive has privately admitted Mark Zuckerberg “doesn’t care” about publishers and warned that if they did not work with the social media giant, “I’ll be holding your hands with your dying business like in a ­hospice”.

So that obviously sounds like good news for those involved.

To top it all off, they’re still trying to push those damn Facebook Stories on everyone by making them even bigger across the top of the mobile app and letting you share the post you’re currently making to them just in case one of the four weirdos that actually uses them is one of your friends.

I guess it’s a good thing they bought Instagram for a measly one billion a little over six years ago because that’s where all the resources are slowly shifting as well as having what little ad space is still available.

But don’t worry, they’re already fucking that up for everyone too.

Let's talk about those awesome Instagram Story ads

According to Facebook:
Instagram Stories is another way for you to tap into people’s passions and inspire them to take action. In fact, of the 400 million accounts using Instagram Stories, one-third of the most viewed stories come from businesses, and one in five stories gets a direct message from its viewers.

Here’s the thing with Instagram Story ads, they’re skippable.

If you even remotely look like you’re promoting something, use a stock image, or push your currently running Instagram ads over to stories, users will skip the hell out of them because you’re interfering with their personal lives.

A lot of this falls onto lazy advertisers who don’t take the time to create for the platform, let alone, the audience they are trying to reach. It also doesn't help that Facebook, by default, has every single ad option pre-selected for you when creating ads in Ad Manager.

If you create an ad and have it pump out to all of these options, which by the way all have different creative aspects, your ad gets cropped, smashed, donkey punched, and strangled with an electrical cord. People always trust a business advertising to them with what looks to be a crumpled up serial killer letter right?

As of right now, you still don’t have ads in IGTV but it’s only a matter of time before they make their way over and you better believe those will be mid-roll or unskippable.

Snapchat has already tried fixing their mistakes in skippable ads by introducing six second ones the user can’t skip back in mid May. The only saving grace is that most of the Snapchat demographic uses the platform primarily for communication with friends and following celebrities opposed to watching the long form video in the “Shows” section that has content from ESPN, NBC, and Viacom where these ads are hosted.

At the end of the day, Facebook will keep squeezing advertisers for as much as their worth across all their platforms and if that means you getting pissed on by them with shitty ads until they find “the highest ROI opportunity” or really, find a few people that like golden showers, so be it.