14 DAY TRIAL // Social media advertising has experienced a continuous growth, to most users’ dissatisfaction, who can’t get accustomed to seeing more and more ads in their homefeed every day.
The advertising revenues, which can reach up to billions of dollars every year, are of vital importance to social platforms, and this is why they sometimes try to stealthily make you watch them, whether you like it or not.
This tactic is generally known as stealth advertising, and just as the name suggests, it’s a company’s way of trying to advertise some products or services without people actually realizing it.
Since people have expressed their frustration with the amount of ads that some of their favorite social networks are forcing them into watching, it seems that the companies have thought of a better way to satisfy their users. And no, not by reducing the number of ads, but by camouflaging them and making people think that they are in fact posts from their friends or followers.
It's getting more difficult to distinguish between an ad and a post
Some of the most important networks have special divisions whose job is to come up with ways of cunningly introducing marketing material in your feed, Nation Multimedia reports.
Google has The Zoo, an in-house agency that claims to mix together creativity and effectiveness, while Facebook can brag about The Creative Shop, which collaborates with big brands such as Budweiser or Ford.
They say that it’s all about creating the right kind of content which will make customers not only click on the ad but also decide to spend their money on buying the product.
Instagram uses the same team of creative developers as Facebook and it started rolling out ads shortly after it was bought by the giant tech company. Now, you might have trouble differentiating them from a regular filtered photo, given that they look very much like your everyday posts.
Cedric Atlan of the Creative Shop at Facebook says, "The brand has to express itself as if it's a person and respect the community." He also adds that "You have come upon the brand the same way you would a friend or someone from your family. The advertising needs to be integrated and not disturb the user."
However, in their desire to increase their advertising revenues, big companies ignore the fact that disguising their ads as posts to trick people into watching them could actually annoy users, as most likely the majority could get frustrated about not being able to easily tell apart a post from a friend from a well-concealed ad.