What Are These Rando Brands on Your Insta Feed?
The next time an ad appears on your Instagram, check out the brand. This is most likely a third-party reseller using the Insta algorithm, content marketing, and good old fashioned arbitration to get you to buy cheap stuff.
In The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal explains:
Some Instagram retailers are legitimate brands with employees and products. Others are simply brokers for Chinese goods, built into bedrooms and launched with no capital or inventory. They were all created thanks to Instagram and Facebook ads combined with a suite of Shopify-based eCommerce tools.
This is a fairly typical method of online selling these days – resellers sell products from Alibaba that freelancers deliver directly to UpWork – but the Instagram version has an interesting twist: Retailers can pay influencers to include product ads in their channels. Since the whole point of influencers is to be followed by many people , retailers can present their product to literally millions of people.
From there, the standard sales pressure tools are applied: there are (fake) countdown clocks that encourage people to buy now, tracking pixels that embed the same ads on other social media sites, pop-ups indicating the number of (potentially fake) people who bought product.
Or, as Madrigal put it:
I like lions, so I subscribe to an Instagram account where their photos are posted, they post ads, so I go to a web page and now I’m being haunted by ads that follow me all over the internet advertising the lion bracelet. It’s enough to make you miss shopping or catalog purchases.