Some thoughts on Instagram’s first ad
The first ad on Instagram, was this, by New York-based fashion designer Michael Kors, about a week ago.
The response since then has been mixed: the expected torrent of negative comments in response to the invasion of a space like Instagram by advertising did happen, but the photo has also received more than 230,000 likes, albeit along the lines of “sure, it’s nice, but I’m not sure how many of those would buy the watch in the photo.”
There are a number of aspects to all this worth flagging up: in the first place, we are talking about the first ever ad on the platform, with all that means in terms of extra media attention and newness for users. Little of what is going on here is likely to be repeated and the protests are unlikely to last long: I can still remember the response to the first email advertisements. Similarly, the surprise factor that will have prompted many people to click Like will probably diminish quickly. Whatever Kevin Systrom and Mark Zuckerberg say, the theoretical 5 percent that converts a good impression into a Like is not sustainable, in the same way that the clickthrough ratios garnered by the first banner ads back in the 1990s were not sustainable either.
The second important thing to bear in mind here is related: what makes somebody click Like to show that they, well, like an ad. In the case of Instagram, it could be because people like it on an artistic level, or that they aspire to owning the watch in question; or it could be the surprise factor: “it attracted my attention because I haven’t seen advertisements here before.” But there is surely another response: “I’m not bothered.” An ad can be nice, funny, evocative, and a hundred other adjectives… the first time you see it. But from the third time on, yeah, sure, it’s nice, but I have seen it already and it no longer has any effect on me.
The more we focus on the “tiredness” factor, the sooner an advertisement’s other attributes also diminish, such as novelty, art, or aspiration. This is why, although television still garners the largest proportion of advertising budgets, we all know that it is a medium where advertising is a hassle, an interruption, something that we would rather avoid, and that we take advantage of to go to the bathroom or look at what’s on the other channels. Sure, a great advertisement can work and increase brand recognition and many other things, but once it has been shown 40 times, it is a pain. And as such, the popularity of the product is in danger of waning each time the advertisement is shown.
If you want my attention, don’t bore me. Please don’t bombard me with messages all the time. Show me something interesting about your product, but don’t carpet bomb me until my last neuron is completely sick of you and your brand. Slip a photo in here, a video there when I’m looking at Instagram that might make me smile, that’s nice, that I like, and that I will see as an advertisement that doesn’t bother me, and might even give me a lift. But if you overdo it, and put the same ad in front of me a hundred times in a row, then the efficiency of your message, and that of your channel, will go down the drain.
Somebody I know who works in the advertising industry and who I respect, used to tell me that my problem was that I wanted advertisements on my page, but ones that “nobody would notice, that don’t move, and that don’t disturb anyone: imperceptible advertising.” Obviously, advertising cannot, by its nature, be imperceptible. Somebody has paid for it to be seen. But there is a difference between paying so that it can be seen and paying so that it hassles people. If the marketing directors of certain companies have learned to live with the fact that they annoy half of humanity and bore the other half with their heavy handed messages and irrational insistence, that’s up to them. I aspire to something better for my conscience.
At bottom, the problem is that we are talking here about advertising via new channels: banners, pre-rolls, etc., as well as other more annoying models such as interstitial ads, roll-down ads, and the now mercifully almost extinct pop-up, but that continue to be used on the same unidirectional basis as before: repetition, hassling, impact, etc. And it simply doesn’t work. Send me a message, and put all the others somewhere I can find them: don’t throw all your messages in my face, make an impact, but don’t be a bore.
It may just be that Kevin Systrom wants to use Instagram to change the nature of the relationship between the site’s users to avoid this time-honored saturation approach, to change the model that advertising executives brought up in the unidirectional era tend to follow, not unlike the way that a bull will repeatedly charge the barriers in the ring when it knows its time has come.
Whether Systrom is able to maintain this model is another question, he is under pressure to meet the quarterly results, and who knows, any day now we may come across an Instagram advertisement that plays over and over again—doubtless some backward thinking numbskull in an advertising agency still rooted in the 20th century is planning a way to make sure that the next time we open our photo album, it will be 100 percent filled with their ads. No comment.
As long as it avoids that pitfall, advertising on Instagram could just work. And in the meantime, this new approach could prompt some interesting discussion.
