Advertising & Instagram

To reveal Burberry's Spring/Summer 2014 collection, the company shot slow motion videos of the runway show on an iPhone and posted the footage to Instagram. The big deal? The videos were ads, not just posts for the brand's Instagram followers. The videos were beautiful and suited to the medium, but still they were ads.

A post on the New Yorker this week bemoans this development as the end of Instagram's sincerity. Instagram's aim is "to make any advertisements you see feel as natural to Instagram as the photos and videos many of you already enjoy from your favorite brands." They intend for the ads to seamlessly fit in with your feed and although they will be from brands you don't follow, they will be in-line with posts from brands you do. However, the argument made in the New Yorker post is that people connect with Instagram and it's content, and love it, because it's sincere, and there's nothing less sincere than an ad.

To me, this outcry seems a little overblown for an number of reasons:

• Advertisements are everywhere. In every aspect of our lives, we're confronted with them. But we're conditioned to them, so a few random posts on Instagram from brands I don't follow is not the end of the world. 
• Social media is a business and Facebook bought Instagram to make money. It's natural that the platform needs a form of monetization.
• If the ads truly feel natural to Instagram, like the Burberry videos, they might be intriguing and creative unlike bland Facebook ad content, which could lead to a more impactful ad format for brands.

If anything, Instagram's authenticity was probably lost when it was bought by Facebook, but that change, just like this addition of ads, still doesn't take away from the unique venue for artistic expression Instagram provides.