I’ve been pretty Instagram-obsessed lately. It’s always been one of my favourite social networks because it's a place to escape into the world of somewhere else. It's a place I follow my favourite athletes (mostly surfers or the photographers that follow them) as they travel the world to amazing destinations, and it's a way to keep up with my more interesting friends and brands with agencies that understand how to make a beautiful image.
Like a lot of people, I'm sure I've always thought of it as a more pure social network: it was simpler than the alternatives, and limited ways to engage kept the experience truly focused on the photos in your feed.
With Instagram removing the restrictions on image dimensions and giving it a more robust direct messaging system, a lot of that simple purity is about to change. Another big change is that ads are coming to the platform (or have already come, depending on where you live).
Our team even did a bit of analysis, and found that comments on an ad from Instagram itself, letting Kiwis know that advertising was coming to the platform, were over 80% negative or extremely negative. People are always reluctant to change, but even more so when it's to something they've probably considered their own for so long, and when the change is so potentially invasive.
While I'm excited to be part of the DDB team working with Instagram and our clients to be launch partners for the advertising platform here in New Zealand, it's also a daunting task. How do we create something that will suddenly appear in what was such a personal, pure space for users that they'll want to react positively to, with a smile, like, or comment?
We will have to see what the results are, but I'm really proud of the work that went into our launch plan and the amazing pieces that our creative team made for this launch, what we're calling Quotography.
Our client, NEON, is a streaming video on demand service here in New Zealand, and we used some of the more famous quotes from shows available on the service and worked them up in pulsating NEON lights. If you can see the examples below, check out the links here and here. (though you'll have to click "play" on the videos to get the auto-play cinemagraph experience that users coming across posts on the Instagram app would get).
I'm really happy with the work that DDB New Zealand did on this (and our clients at NEON for working through it with us and making it happen), but there are also a ton of other great Instagram accounts out there. Below are a few of my favourites, presented without commentary (the images link through to the accounts, so click and follow):
