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Instagram’s New Ads Like Small Storefronts

November 11, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

Sometimes there are just too many steps between seeing an ad and receiving the product advertised.

Instagram has a new idea that may drop those steps considerably thanks to a new breed of advertising that takes its own platform and adds a couple others to produce a mobile ad so interactive, it can be purchased from directly.

Instagram is getting together with Apple on two fronts—3D Touch and Apple Pay—to produce a combination that will take engagement in advertisement to a whole new level.

We all know about Instagram’s “Shop Now” button that allowed users to go straight from an ad to a landing page where a purchase could be made, but now, Instagram’s new ads may pull even that step out of the process and make it possible to buy immediately from the ad itself.

3D Touch, one of the biggest features of the iPhone 6S, allows for detection of pressures on the screen, allowing a lighter touch to do one thing while a heavier touch does something else. With this, advertisers can effectively put multiple images in one ad that can be scrolled through by the person viewing the ad.

From there, Apple Pay can swing in to let a user pay with fingerprint authentication rather than having to put in credit card information. It opens up some other possibilities as well, like being able to scroll through different colors of a single model of shirt, or different menu items at a restaurant.

For Instagram, it opens up the opportunity to reduce a step in the customer experience and allowing users to go straight from viewing an ad to buying the product, without even a landing page to slow the process down. It is effectively the ultimate in impulse advertising, allowing customers to immediately order a product on the strength of the ad itself. That’s a masterstroke for marketers, and allows customers to shop from just about anywhere.

There’s one important caveat here that some have pointed out: Instagram may be wearing its welcome thin with users, especially with the increasing quantities of advertising. While early advertising was more considered and deliberate—some even said that the advertising actually looked like an organic photo.

It wasn’t intrusive, it wasn’t out of place, and it didn’t feel like an ad. Instagram’s new line of advertising may add to those problems, or it may actually help solve the problem, depending on how it’s approached. If the ads are designed to look like organic photos again, but now have the 3D Touch / Apple Pay components added, that may open up new possibilities for Instagram.

The advertising looks like a photo, and the site is full of photos anyway, so the advertising will be more comfortable to live with. If the advertising gets too cumbersome, viewers will leave.

With this program, Instagram may be able to have the best of both worlds: happy users, and happy advertisers. That’s a development to crave, and any success in that vein will be icing on an already impressive cake.