Weekly digital media

Instagram ads reach the UK with Waitrose, Rimmel and Channel 4

This article spoke about how Instagram are now allowing brands such as Waitrose, Sony music and Rimmel London to run ads on instagram for free. They said they are giving these brands a chance to promote their products to a much wider audience. They also say that they want it to be as if the people viewing these pictures to be like they are looking at high quality ads like they would see in a magazine. They had already tried this in America before you could do videos on Instagram and are targeting Canada and Australia next as they are targeting the English spoken countries. They want to be shown as a premium environment. They say if this proves successful they may then use paid ads.

Statistics

The app was ported to Android smartphones in April 2012, shortly beforeFacebook agreed to buy the company for $1bn. Instagram now has more than 200m active users who have posted more than 20bn photos with its app.

In October 2013, when Instagram had 150m active users, the company’s chief executive Kevin Systrom told the Guardian that 6.9m of those people were in the UK: one of its biggest countries outside the US.

In my opinion I believe this is a clever idea, as Instagram is becoming more and more popular and if it is similar to what Twitter do in that for e.g. I tweet a lot about football and as a result I see a lot of promoted ads on football and betting so if Instagram were to do something similar in a way that they would do promotions on pictures I like such as music artists I believe it would be a clever promotion idea as these businesses could then have gained awareness on a wider scale as they said before.