The job­bing busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er seek­ing to expand agency busi­ness will very short­ly be able add Insta­gram to the list of sites for plac­ing ads. The free pho­to shar­ing app, which was acquired by Face­book in April last year, is pro­ceed­ing with its gen­tle approach to embrac­ing online adver­tis­ing sales and has now unveiled new details about what its users can expect.

Adver­tis­ing, Instagram-style

The com­pa­ny assured users last month that adver­tis­ing posts won’t jar with the network’s visu­al appeal and will feel nat­ur­al. Adver­tis­ing videos and pho­tos fea­tured on the net­work, Insta­gram has now revealed, will look pret­ty much the same as reg­u­lar posts, but there’ll be a few sub­tle dif­fer­ences. Instead of the user’s name (which appears in the top left cor­ner of the image or video), spon­sored con­tent will bear the brand name. And instead of the time­stamp in the right upper cor­ner, there’ll be a label read­ing “Spon­sored”.

The ques­tion hard-boiled busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers may now be ask­ing is prob­a­bly “Is that all?” The answer, of course, is “no”. Users will be giv­en the choice of hid­ing any ad they dis­like (and pro­vid­ing feed­back on that they took excep­tion to) by going to the bot­tom right cor­ner and click­ing the “…” sym­bol. With user feed­back, Insta­gram says it will pro­vide bet­ter tar­get­ing. And to that end, it’ll also glean what its user’s inter­ests are and which brands they fol­low by explor­ing their Insta­gram and Face­book activity.

At this stage, Insta­gram has restrict­ed the brands it’ll allow to adver­tise to a rel­a­tive­ly small bunch of rec­og­niz­able name, includ­ing Pay­Pal, Macy’s, Ben & Jer­ry’s and Gen­er­al Electric.

Gam­bling with Instagram’s reputation?

Accord­ing to Jim Tobin, the Pres­i­dent of the mar­ket­ing firm Ignite Social Media, after hav­ing spent $1 bil­lion on the Insta­gram acqui­si­tion, Face­book clear­ly had to find a way to mon­e­tize it, not least in order to stay sweet with stock mar­ket expectations.

He said:

“Insta­gram is doing the right thing by eas­ing the ad for­mat onto its users over time and look­ing for reac­tion but the chal­lenge is way beyond for­mat. It’s also what mar­keters do with the ads once they’re giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­trol the con­tent and the targeting.”

Mak­ing sure the ads go on appeal­ing to its users will be the key to its suc­cess, Tobin added.