Make Way for Instagram Reel Ads - An Insight
Following a successful test in a few locations, Instagram will soon display advertisements on its short-video feature Reels. The adverts will be similar to those shown on the company’s Stories section, where they will appear in between Reels footage.
The adverts can last up to 30 seconds and can be commented on, liked, viewed, saved, and shared. These advertisements will be displayed in the most popular areas of Reels.
The ads were first tested in India, Brazil, Germany, and Australia, and then in Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. BMW, Nestle, Louis Vuitton, Netflix, Uber, and other companies have adopted the new layouts.
It’s difficult to predict how successful the format will be because so much depends on the creative and how interesting your ad content is. TikTok commercials, for example, perform better when they appear natural, as consumers are less likely to swipe past them as soon as they appear.
However, monetizing short-form video is difficult. Users may simply ignore promotional messages, and there’s no mechanism to place them mid-stream or pre-roll, as Vine discovered the hard way, while no other platform has been able to properly combine advertising into short-form video streams.
Instagram is likely expecting that at the very least, this style will produce positive results for its ad partners. Reels commercials were originally introduced in April in India, Brazil, Germany, and Australia, before being expanded to brands in Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States late last month. The expansion is part of a larger Reels monetization push, with the goal of creating a more sustainable Reels eco-system in which Reels artists can be compensated for their work.However, determining the format’s genuine worth will take some time and testing.
Although Instagram hasn’t provided any official statistics on Reels usage, CEO Adam Mosseri has stated that the feature is growing “both in terms of how much people are sharing and how much people are consuming.”
But it’s still a long way behind TikTok, and with a recent report claiming that TikTok users now spend more time on the app than they do on Facebook or Instagram, Facebook will no doubt continue to promote Reels usage in order to prevent its users from migrating across and becoming sucked into TikTok’s never-ending video feed
Reels could be a smart ad option with that continuous drive, but individual outcomes will vary, and the structure will most certainly adapt over time.