When asked how many people at Facebook Canada work on Instagram, Jordan Banks answers without hesitation: “Everybody.”
“It sounds sort of glib to say everybody, but it’s the truth,” Facebook Canada’s managing director continues, insisting the company has taken an all-hands-on-deck approach to Instagram’s rollout in Canada. “Measurement, creative, PR, sales, marketing – Instagram is at the front of everybody’s minds.”
That steadfast focus has elevated Instagram’s local ad offering from an unknown quantity to a fully realized platform, all in less than 12 months. The company introduced Instagram ads in Canada via a beta test in November 2014 and soon after launched a full suite of marketer-pleasing features, including new ad units like video and carousel ads, self-service buying, direct response capabilities and extensive targeting.
From the outset, Instagram had the ear of Canadian marketers. Its beta group of advertisers included some of the country’s most notable brands: Hudon’s Bay, Sport Chek, Air Canada, Mercedes Benz Canada and Travel Alberta.
Early campaigns posted promising results. Canadian Tire, for example, saw a 45-point lift in ad recall for its March “Shovel It Forward” campaign on Instagram – nine times the Nielsen average.
TD Bank likewise used the platform to great success, reaching over one million people with its Pride campaign on Instagram. The ads also delivered on the bank’s overall objectives, resulting in an eight-point lift in consumers’ associations with TD as an LGBT-friendly company and an 18-point lift in awareness of TD’s support of the LGBT community.
Investment from a breadth of brands followed as Instagram opened its ads up to the market. “It has exploded beyond what I had expected on the monetization side,” Banks said, adding, “It started almost exclusively as a brand platform and has evolved pretty quickly to not only address brand metric and objectives, but also direct response.”
Internally, Joelle Maslaton, a long-time client partner at Facebook, was named brand development lead for Instagram in Canada. Another Toronto staffer, Daniel Habashi, was named Instagram’s director of brand development for North America.
The company spent significantly on education, sending Maslaton and Habashi out on the conference circuit and mounting a roadshow to creative and media agencies to showcase what Instagram has to offer. The company also hosts “Instagram Labs” with new advertisers and their agencies to help them build a foundation for Instagram and has a video-specific roadshow set for the final quarter of 2015.
Working directly with brands led to a string of ad innovations, like the Instagram cinemagraph ad Mercedes-Benz Canada created with the startup Flixel – a first for the company globally that has now been widely adopted.
The results of efforts to lure brands to Instagram have been handsome. eMarketer pegged the platform’s global ad revenues at $595 million for 2015 (the company doesn’t release region-specific revenue gains, but the list of top tier advertisers on Instagram suggests local marketers have latched on to the platform). That figure will soon balloon as brands flock to Instagram in Canada and around the world. By 2017, eMarketer expects the platform to pull in almost $3 billion in revenue.
