Instagram expands its Carousel ad format, as it now allows marketers to push videos, photos or a combination of the two right under users' noses.
At the launch of Video Carousel, important brands such as W Hotels, Taco Bell, Hollister, IBM and Airbnb jumped in the bandwagon.
The Carousel service is an addition to Instagram launched in March 2015. Carousel ads can be bypassed by users, but their increasing number will make them hard to ignore. The company is pretty optimistic about its upcoming growth seeing how videos will make Carousel even more engaging.
"Video carousel ads [...] give marketers creative flexibility to tell richer stories on Instagram," says Instagram's global leader of business and brand development, James Quarles.
Quarles notes that one of the main challenges marketers face is holding clients' attention in a world bombarded with mobile content. He adds that Carousel ads prove that swipeable series are better at the task when compared to static images. Instagram conducts internal studies on ad recall, and video ads demonstrate that conversation rate spiked by as much as 58 percent.
The head of Instagram's brand development mentions that businesses can tell their stories to customers better through immersive sequential videos, allowing customers to understand the value of the respective product or service.
On average, each Instagram users spends 21 minutes per day on the platform. With an active user base of 400 million, it comes as no surprise that over 200,000 businesses advertise their activity on the platform. On a broader picture, the daily time spent by an American adult on social networks is 43 minutes, with a small increase expected to happen by 2018.
Reports indicate that Instagram and its parent company, Facebook, are considering new user-engaging tools, such as creating an algorithm that reorders the feeds in a better manner.
Analysts at eMarketer observe that more and more people spend time on Facebook due to the powerful engagement driven by video content.
Monica Peart, an analyst with eMarketer, says Snapchat and Instagram are important competitors for Facebook in terms of time spent on social media. Facebook's competitors have a big opportunity to gain traction by turning video as a "core feature of their platforms," Peart estimates.
