Advertising and the End of Instagram's Sincerity

Perhaps you caught the slow-motion videos that Burberry shot of its Spring-Summer 2014 runway show, filmed exclusively with the iPhone 5s and posted to Instagram; Apple made an uncharacteristically loud fuss about it. But you probably didn’t. That will change soon.

Nearly a year after it rolled out profile pages suited to brands and made changes to its terms of service that incited a revolt among its users because of how explicitly they spelled out that the future of Instagram will be paid for with advertising dollars, not merely Facebook’s largesse, Instagram has announced that the long-awaited arrival of advertising on the service is at last imminent:

In the next couple months, you may begin seeing an occasional ad in your Instagram feed if you’re in the United States. Seeing photos and videos from brands you don’t follow will be new, so we’ll start slow. We’ll focus on delivering a small number of beautiful, high-quality photos and videos from a handful of brands that are already great members of the Instagram community.

For users, there are effectively two kinds of content on ad-supported social networks: real content and ads. What generally distinguishes the two for a user is whether or not a post comes from someone or something that he or she cares about. If they care about it, it’s content; if they don’t, it’s an ad. They want to see one but not the other. For brands, that conceptual slippage is particularly powerful, as users willingly enmesh the brands and products they do care about within their actual relations to people. If someone follows Starbucks on Instagram, they want to see pictures of coffee in the same stream as pictures of their friends.

Instagram’s plan from the beginning has been to exploit that conceptual slippage between content and advertising in a powerful new way, because it is the social network with the greatest claim to a foundation of genuine emotion. Instagram has become what it is because people care about it and what they put on it in a way that isn’t true of Twitter or Facebook—and which is precisely why Facebook bought it.

Instagram is hoping, additionally, that the ads will be so aesthetically pleasing that you won’t notice, or at least won’t be upset, about seeing them in the previously unpolluted Instagram feed. Instagram wants you to love its ads, even if they are from brands you do not want to follow: “Our 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.” In some ways, the Burberry ads shot in slow motion with the iPhone is a picture-perfect preview of what Instagram ads will be like: beautiful, suited to the medium, and brimming with brands. (Instagram’s timing in adding videos to the service earlier this summer certainly seems fortuitous now.)

The problem that Instagram faces as it starts slowly pouring ads into users’ feeds is that, until now, most everything it has done—except for removing its photos from Twitter—has been in earnest, despite the fact it is owned by one of the most fundamentally cynical companies in technology. People connect to Instagram and its content, and love it because, as Paul Ford put it, it is sincere. But there’s nothing less sincere than an ad.

Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty