Subscribe

Instagram crams in more advertising video

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 05 May 2016
Instagram will now allow advertisers to use up to five one-minute videos in a single carousel advert.
Instagram will now allow advertisers to use up to five one-minute videos in a single carousel advert.

A month after Instagram first introduced one-minute videos on its picture-sharing platform, the social network now allows advertisers to make use of up to five one-minute videos in its carousel ads.

Carousel adverts are a series of images that Instagram users scroll horizontally. Previously, carousel adverts were only still images, but can now be a mixture of still and video.

The Facebook-owned social network said it introduced the ad format because research showed adding video to an existing campaign drives higher favourability than campaigns with static photos only.

"With the carousel ad format, marketers can build ads using up to five pieces of video and photo content, as a combination, for richer storytelling. The maximum video length is 60 seconds per video. Initial results show carousel formats have, on average, a 2.5-point increase in ad recall over static image formats," the company said in a statement.

Amy Cole, head of brand development EMEA at Instagram, says: "Since we introduced carousel ads last year, businesses using the format have seen solid results. In the last six months, we've seen video consumption on Instagram increase by 40%. With the launch of video carousel, marketers have even more creative flexibility to tell their brand's visual stories on Instagram."

In February, the company announced it had attracted over 200 000 advertisers since opening the app in September to anyone wanting to purchase an ad. Three-quarters of its advertisers are now outside of the US, the company said.

Instagram has rapidly grown its user base, surpassing 400 million users last year. By comparison, Twitter, which began selling advertisements more than five years ago, has 130 000 advertisers and 320 million users.

Share