Instagram has become home to a number of curious cultural phenomenons: fitness inspiration, gun sales, cheerleaders redefining the word "popular," plus the everyday cat photo and selfie barrages. But there's another unique user group building massive followings. And given the app's reputation for being casual and, to put it generously, impressionistic, maybe these are the last people you'd expect to find on Instagram: professional photographers.
The pros aren't just there to repost the portfolio DSLR shots and spread their work even thinner. Instead, they are using the platform toward a professional end. The pros of Instagram shoot for advertisers, make money, and build a reputation as users who can connect with people on social media (an ability that still eludes many marketers).
The real start of Instagram ads
Instagram started feeding advertising to its users in broad strokes at the end of 2013. Its early partners were companies like Levi's and Charity Water, brands that already had a large presence on the service.
But professionally shot advertising was already circulating on Instagram for a while, and not only in the form of throwaway product endorsements from celebrities. Rather, ads took the form of artful photos from professional photographers, mixing business and leisure and work and play into one continuous stream of digital images.
If they're Instagram celebrities, it's not in the conventional pop-culture sense. But many pros have found a home on the service where they can carry on capturing their lives and work with a few tens or hundreds of thousands of followers looking on. For better or worse, their Instagram feeds have proved to be a natural environment for sponsored placement.
Michael O'Neal (@moneal, 550,000 followers) is one such user, a professional photographer and Instagram user whose work on the service received national attention. In the fall of 2013, O'Neal shot a campaign for Vogue using his iPhone, shooting models in locales like Grand Central Station. Photographer Chris Ozer (@chirsozer, 551,000 followers) is another who has shot Instagram campaigns for Nike. Photographer Alice Gao (@alice_gao, 710,000 followers) has posted for La Mer, a luxury skin care company that retails 1-ounce jars of moisturizer for $155.
Rebecca Finch (@bexfinch, 192,000 followers), a photographer and Instagram user who lives and works in Brooklyn, hews close to her own personal style when choosing advertisers. For instance, Finch originated the hashtag #fromwhereistand, which entails top-down shots of a user's legs, feet, the ground, and occasionally an object held in one hand. She's found a natural symbiosis with footwear companies and has in the past engaged with the brands Tretorn and Keds.
Julian Bialowas (@julianbialowas, 10,000 followers), a designer by trade, has a magnitude fewer followers than the biggest photographer names on Instagram. Even so, his distinctive eye and skill with a camera have landed him partnerships with the likes of Levi's and Ducati. "You get a spec and then they let you go off on your own, you have to use a hashtag, et cetera," said Bialowas. For instance, Levi's, who hired him as part of a promotion for its line of Commuter jeans, required him to use #commuter. Often the photos in Instagram campaigns are cross-posted to brands' own Instagram accounts or Facebook pages.
Where ads go, how, and why
Instagram posts that are sponsored on the backend by a brand are a new form of an old marketing tactic, i.e., using a spokesperson to sell an experience. Advertising routed through a person with a strong social media presence is basically as old as social media itself. But as the Internet created an exponentially greater number of avenues for this advertising, the lines between marketing and relationship-free endorsement have become muddled. Plenty of bloggers have come under fire for not disclosing when a sample was free, for accepting fees, and for endorsing something without so much as a hint of the payoff.
Even before Instagram was selling its own ads, there were plenty of Instagrammers who were able to get advertisers to buy space on the app. The cadre of users who could and can do this have invariably cultivated a personal brand for their photography, but most of them are skilled enough that were it not for Instagram, they might be shooting the campaign on another platform. But it's turned out that an Instagram feed is a monetizable place to hang their work, where the ads can get a secondary benefit from the personal touch of the ever-important "personal brand."
Advertising remains a highly visual medium, filled primarily with pictures and, where possible, video. Instagram naturally lends itself to advertising because its content focus is, obviously, photos and, more recently, video. If there's accompanying text to a sponsored post, it's short, sweet, and secondary. Even who is posting the photo is not incredibly important, just as a quality advertisement in a magazine or on a website can be benefited by, but is not dependent on, the celebrity displayed in it.
The matter of disclosure
The FTC effected some guidelines to encourage disclosure of these relationships back in 2009, when product sponsorships in social media became particularly rampant. Even #sponsored tweets enjoyed brief interest from marketers throwing advertising methods at the social media wall to see if anything stuck. While the textual Twitter has yet to become a successful platform for direct advertising through users, bloggers remain popular with marketers, particularly in the fashion industry, as a vector for advertising. Just a year after the FTC put the spotlight on these advertising relationships, Internetgoers and smartphone users got a whole new platform that lent itself entirely to photo-posting and follower-building off of those photos: Instagram.
Thanks to the hashtag, Instagram posts' presentation as advertising is often very subtle. Companies may require Instagrammers to include certain information in the text caption of the posts, both for tracking and disclosure purposes, but the language is typically vague. The closest mention of sponsorship may be a non sequitur mention of the brand itself: #mercedesbenz, for instance.
Often, posts directly sponsored for a user's feed mingle among personal work or behind-the-scenes moments from a shoot, so it can be marginally difficult to discern what is what. The gray areas are part of the frustration, beauty, and marketing genius of the format: when the bulk of a user's photos are involved in taking photos for money, it's very easy for directly funded work to blend into the stream.
But along with that level of abstraction that tilts the needle in the company's favor, it's important to stick to what feels "natural" to the user's feed and their photography. Even if a handful of users are united by their marketable Instagram skills, they all differ in the partnerships they could make.
A sponsored Instagram post can also become a meta-exhibition of professional work composed and produced outside of Instagram, adding to the pretty mess of work and play that true sponsorships can play off of. If the user shot a photo for a magazine campaign but cross-posted one of the shots to drive attention to the professional opportunity or document their personal experience, the usage of content would hardly be different. The same cannot really be said about a celebrity posting photos of herself posing with her favorite moisturizer. Finally, what advertisers can get out of pro Instagrammers aside from excellent positioning is, obviously, a quality image. Typically, the photos born of the Instagram promo cottage industry pass disclosure muster with the FTC guidelines, so for a few Instagrammers, this ends up being a large portion of the content they post.
Insta-artisans
The Instagram sponsorship potential has spawned a few businesses for enabling these partnerships. The Mobile Media Lab is an agency dedicated to connecting brands with Instagrammers for promoting whatever product makes sense for the platform. Last year, the company completed a campaign for the photo editing app Over that was demonstrated and mentioned on the accounts of 25 Instagram users ranging from 5,800 followers to 409,000 followers. Over made it to the #3 spot on the Photo and Video charts in Apple's App store, second only to AfterLight and Camera+.
Tinker Street is another agency that connects Instagrammers with brands, though it's more like a collective of like-minded photographers than a group of middlemen. Tinker Street (and Tinker Mobile, the subdivision that deals with brand partnerships via "influencers from the mobile community" specifically) comprises some of Instagram's biggest names and formidable photographers in their own right. The company is headed by the aforementioned Michael O'Neal, and it includes photographers like Theron Humphrey (@thiswildidea, 449,000 followers), who published a book of his dog precariously balanced on various surfaces.
The aformentioned Chris Ozer, another Tinker Street member, quit his full-time job in administration in 2013 to focus on photography full time. The work he was able to do on Instagram helped indirectly spur the jump. In an interview with Ars, Ozer emphasized the experimental nature of Instagram partnerships and how they're still evolving. "Everyone's still trying to figure out the best way to do it," he said.
Like the other photographers we spoke to for this article, Ozer emphasized the importance of making a campaign "feel organic" to a user's feed, and he said he always tries to make campaign work feel personal. The Nike Fuelband, Tom's Shoes, and Stella Artois Cidre have been some of the products he's featured on his account. In 2013, Ozer competed with a handful of other Instagram users to win a Mercedes-Benz CLA by posting photos documenting a road trip in the car. The winner was determined by "engagement," the total number of interactions their posts generated.
"We hired them [the winners] for their photography," Mercedes-Benz told Ars of the contest. However, the company was "certainly paying attention to follower size," too, a representative said. Mercedes-Benz required the selected photographers to state on their posts that the company hired them for the project, which involved depicting a road trip with the car in question. Mercedes-Benz wanted the disclosures to be "apparent and transparent." Ultimately, Ozer won the car by taking a road trip through San Francisco, showcasing the car in the city's characteristic fog and haze.
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