The leading photo sharing service Instagram, owned by Facebook, is testing various new ad formats—among them interactive ads with In-App Purchases and built-in support for Force Touch and Apple Pay.
As reported last evening by Digiday, citing an ad agency source familiar with the test, the company is hoping that new ad formats will help drive sales by selling items right from the Instagram feed, without the need to click off the app.
“Some of the shopping tests incorporate features like Apple’s Force Touch screen feature, which lets consumers apply pressures in their clicks to switch among multiple product options in the images,” reports the publication.
“Force Touch gets interesting, because instead of quickly tapping Shop Now to buy this one thing, you can choose from two or three offers,” said the ad exec.
Currently, Instagram has a Shop Now button which launched in June, carousel ads for brands to highlight multiple product images and has recently opened Facebook’s powerful ad platform to all Instagram ad buyers.
Providing an even more frictionless shopping experience is Apple’s mobile payment solution, the Apple Pay, which would let Instagram users buy items with a touch of their finger, right from the Instagram feed.
I’m not sure this will be a change for the better because Instagram was originally conceived as a platform for easy sharing of photos via mobile devices. Sure you can inject even more advertising into people’s feeds but I don’t think folks will be actually impulse-buying items straight from feed ads.
Does integrating shopping clicks with the Instagram platform make sense to you?
Source: Digiday