It has only been six weeks since Instagram started running ads, but social media marketing experts are already seeing positive results from their marketing activities as early as now.

The first ads that the social media app ran on the first day of November came from big brands like Ben & Jerry’s, Adidas, Burberry, Levi’s, and Michael Kors. These brands were delighted to see a 32% lift in ad recall from each of their campaign versus ads that were exposed to people in control groups. This means that users who saw an ad on Instagram are 32% more likely to recall that product than those who have never seen the ad. Brand message awareness of people who saw the ads also increased by 10%.

Effects on businesses

Since running Instagram ads in a nine-day period, Levi’s reached 7.4 million people aged 18 to 34, while Ben & Jerry’s reached 9.8 million Americans of the same age demographic within eight days. According to Levi’s digital head Julie Channing, what made the ads effective is their novelty.

“We suspected these ads would attract more attention regardless of the content, given their newness. We suspected these ads would attract more attention regardless of the content, given their newness. That’s partly why we didn’t prioritize engagement as the primary performance metric out of the gate,” said Channing.

She added that their focus was on social media marketing metrics like recall, as it reflects their success in grabbing their market’s attention. Channing adds, “It’s doubtful this effect will decline over time, because the key to high recall is Instagram’s ability to take over a small screen with a message that is fully integrated into the content being organically consumed by the user.”

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Photo Credit: Jason A. Howie and adkorte on Flickr