Juli Wert

Mass Media Industry

Professor Keatley

4/5/2019

Invisible Advertising

If you look at your pinky finger of the hand that you most often hold your phone, you

might notice a dip right where the last knuckle is. That is there because of how much one holds

their phone. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. According to Del Gigante, the average American

spends 23.6 hours online weekly, and much of that time is spent on social media. Instagram in

particular is a social media app that is primarily based upon social networking, microblogging,

photo sharing, and video sharing (Jolly). The nature of advertising drastically changes based

upon the media that it serves. The subtle advertisements posted by popular Instagram influencers

are changing the advertising industry into a sneaky practice that affects the mind subconsciously

but can be avoided by smarter scrolling tactics.

The nature of advertisements has changed as media has changed and evolved over

time.The old techniques are just not cutting it anymore and are becoming ineffective as the same

types of ads are played over and over again. Between the 2014 and 2016, global social

advertising spending doubled from 16 billion dollars to 31 billion dollars (Jolly). More money is

needed to fund the research and also the creation of the ads. Brands on average are now

devoting 33% of ad spending to digital platforms alone, which is up from 25% in 2014. Over the

next five years, projected from 2018, the spending is set to rise another 71%,, 25% of this will be

specifically for social media (Del Gigante). The global mobile ad revenue in 2018 was $6.84

billion dollars. The instagram influencer market alone is expected to rise to two billion dollars by
2019 (Neal). The brands who advertise have specific goals in mind: Build a brand, engage new

customers, sell new products, maintain the interest, and promote coupons (Del Gigante).

The app has over 500 million monthly users with 35% of adults with technology having

active accounts (Del Gigante). Out of these users, 60% of them are under thirty years of age

(Cyca). The app’s user base also contains over two million company pages. Just in the United

States, 70.7% of companies have a dedicated Instagram page to advertise on (Envy). Company

pages are made to act as the human face of a company and often present as a single individual

and not a team of trained media professionals. Much like any other media platform, this one is

rampart with advertisements.

Every new popular app is able to utilize social media in a new way that has never been

done before. That is why they become popular. Instagram, in a study done by Hilde A.M,

Voorveld, Guda Van Noort, et. al, ranked highest utilization in past time. The app is used to fill

empty moments. The people who use Instagram such are strongly demographically skewed to

female and minority users 18-29 years old (Jolly). This is an audience who cares about what

other people post, and compare themselves to other posters. The audience can easily identify

brands from repeated exposure and they how where about to find the product and about how

much it would cost.

Advertisements are able to run so smoothly on the app because instagram has the highest

average amount of audience engagement (Jolly). Instagram engagement is 58% higher than

Facebook and 2000% higher than Twitter. Engagement being the “emotional, intuitive,

experiences and perceptions that users have using a medium” (Voorveld, Van Noort, et. al.) This

is liking, commenting, and sharing posts. Instagram, along with having the highest user

engagement, also has the highest daily activity rates (Yu). The content creator is able to then see
how many engagements posts get and gauge how good the posts are. They can use engagements

to see what kinds of posts will be more popular than others, and decide to post more of that type

or not. Instagram advertisement popularity closely follows the “Lens of source credibility

theory” (Neal). This is a theory that proves that personal connotations to the individual

presenting advertisements will directly influence whether or not the customer trust the product

that they are pandering. The factors that have been decided to influence this are expertness,

trustworthiness, likeability, dynamism, objectivity, and attractiveness (Neal). This theory is often

related to celebrity endorsements. We can get a nice pretty celebrity to sponsor baby food, but

they would not have a pro-wrestler do the same.

Instead of using a celebrity, peer enforcers are also popularly used. A peer enforcer is a

satisfied customer that is trustworthy and pushes a product that personally relates to them. It is

more like a friend giving a recommendation of where to go to the doctors, or who to hire to weed

your garden. Think of a famous Instagram fitness account; They will post deals with sports

companies, not music gear. Instead of a work out buddy telling you about her new leggings in

between reps, it is a poster on social media. When a famous account posts ads, they are seen as

both a celebrity endorsement and a peer enforcer, a combination that is stronger than when they

are individual (Neal). Those factors being together makes it seem like a close friend is

personally recommending a product to a viewer. In actuality, thousands if not millions are

coming away with the same feeling, each viewer takes it as a real interaction of a trusted friend.

Any instagram user can become famous. They can either set out to become popular or it

happens by chance. They are just normal people who are very lucky and show “exemplary taste

and talent” (Neal). They post a variety of different picture types: autobiographical that show their

mundane life to seem relatable, propaganda, which is your beautiful model with the fancy car on
the white sand beach to elicit envy and interest, and self help, in which the creator shows a

master skill like fitness, crafting, or cooking. When the account owner is able to interact with the

audience, they create an illusion of a face-to-face relationship in which the viewer feels

parasocial interaction. This is then strengthened by the fact that the fans of the accounts are now

more commonly referred to as “followers.” This word association illices another perceived

closeness from viewer to creator. These tactics all contribute into getting more post interaction.

Accounts with more engaged viewers are known to have a more favorable evaluation of the

embedded ad (Del Gigante). By using the Instagram platform, they are able to sway opinions on

trends, brands, and products (Neal). Consumers often look towards celebrities on constructing

their own identities and also getting product information (Neal). This comes from the base

emotion of envy. As an instagram user, one gets to see lavish lifestyles and tax-brackets that are

completely unimaginable and unobtainable for the average human. This envy stems from three

base ideas as the article “Envy Sells” tells us: we must be confronted with a person who has a

greater quality than us, we must desire this quality, and we thus experience some negative

feeling as a result. By viewing the content of Instafamous users, one can start to feel a sense of

lack. But lo! The ads they post allow the average user to emulate their aesthetic and daily

choices.

Advertising on Instagram, although lucrative, can be difficult to maintain. The

advertisements are hard to exactly pinpoint the revenue changes (Del Gigante). A lot of people

might see the advertisement, but who will ignore it and who will act? There is no one to one rule

in advertising. Looking at an advertisement does not force the viewer to succumb and buy the

product. The cycle of content creation is very tight, as it is for all forms of social media. New

products are always being made, so new advertisements need to quickly follow (Del Gigante).
The posts also have to be very frequent, as repetition is a key component in the success of

advertisements. Another strange nuance is the type on sponsorship and the relationship between

the product and the sponsoree. In the same group of people, a sponsor by a famous athlete for

athletic wear will be considered favourable on all parties. The viewer is happy that the athlete is

partnering with the brand. But if the content is a make-up artist who is sponsoring beauty

products, the viewer will look at both negatively and feel like it was a sell-out (Neal). But this

whole argument is based on the societal pressures that makeup is bad and that is a completely

different essay.

Anything posted to a large fanbase will have direct effects on the viewer of the posts.

Marketing agencies know how to make a brand instantly recognizable, and because of this fact,

most things on instagram can be seen as ads even when they are not intended to be. If a popular

account posts a picture of her walking with her friends, a good chunk of the audience might be

able to at the very least tell what kind of backpack they are wearing. Jansport? Kanken? They

have one and it is a really cute backpack, I might get one. The content poster might not know

how much their daily fashion choices matter, but the company will not complain about that; it is

free advertising.

There ads may be everywhere, but a knowledgeable internet user would easily be able to

tell. We know that all of these ads must be clearly noted, so a smart user would know that they

are being paid to share and may just be in it for the money. Or even without being stated, some

specific hashtags or word choice might discern the difference. With the knowledge of what goes

into an ad, the internet user might be slightly less susceptible than the average viewer. A

possibility that would lead to less impulse purchasing or feelings of envy.

 The goal here is to be able to view popular content with a critical eye. They could be

being paid for the candy they eat on camera. It is the views job to be able to discern who the

poster is and try to focus more on the message that they try to spread, rather than the price-tag on

their shoes, and where to get those shoes, they are so cute, it’s a good thing they have a product

code that gets me 15% off. As a smart social media user, one must know how to spot ads. They

are becoming incredibly more common and harder to spot. There is advertising seen in every

waking moment and item that humans have gotten their hands on. Capitalism is uberall in this

society and one must be able to see the propaganda inherent in all advertisements.

Works Cited

Cyca, Michelle. “Instagram Ads: The Complete Guide for Marketers.” Hootsuite Social Media

Management, 1 May 2018, blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-ads-guide/.

“Envy Sells: The Psychology of Instagram Marketing.” Observing Psychologically, 21 Aug.

2017, observingpsychologically.wordpress.com/2017/08/21/the-psychology-of-

instagram-marketing/.

Gigante, Michael Del. “How Social Media Has Changed The Ad Game [Infographic].”

MDG Advertising, 2 Oct. 2018, www.mdgadvertising.com/marketing-

insights/infographics/how-social-media-changed-the-ad-game-infographic/.

Jolly, Warren, and Warren JollyCEO. “The 6 Most Effective Types of Social Media

Advertising in 2019.” The BigCommerce Blog, 27 Feb. 2019,

www.bigcommerce.com/blog/social-media-advertising/.

Neal, Morgan, ‘Instagram Influencers: The Effects of Sponshorship on Follower Engagement

With Fitness Instagram Celebrities” (2017). Thesis. Rochester Institute of Technology.

Voorveld, Hilda A. M., et al. “Engagement with Social Media and Social Media Advertising:

The Differentiating Role of Platform Type.” Taylor & Francis, 13 Feb. 2018,

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00913367.2017.1405754?scroll=top&needAccess

=true.

Yu, Richard K. “Social Media: The Appeal of Instagram Ads.” Medium, The Startup, 9 June

2018, medium.com/swlh/social-media-the-appeal-of-instagram-ads-3e5f5150d7c6.