Ad blocking within Instagram. Is it a good idea?

All of us have wondered at one time or another “Why am I getting served this ad?” while scrolling through various social media channels, but few of us actually take action to remove said ads. So at Granular, we asked ourselves the extreme question, “What would happen if we block ALL the ads?” Well, our very own Mark Lee used Instagram to find out.

SHOW NOTES

  • How this thought experiment came to be (01:24)
  • The thought experiment setup (07:23)
  • TL:DL – setup summary (11:00)
  • Learnings from the setup (11:25)
  • Ads are being served (15:00)
  • Week 1 – feels oh so right (17:57)
  • Week 2 – it starts to get spicy (20:12)
  • Week 3  – the wheels are now off the bus (26:40)
  • Wrapping up the takeaways (31:50)

Email us at info@GranularMarketing.com

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

Narrator: Welcome to Getting Granular, the podcast where digital Marketing experts from the agency Granular talk about the latest trends, tried and true best practices, and share their unfiltered thoughts about the industry. Whether you’re here to learn how to grow your business, improve your digital skills, or just want to hear some Midwest PPC experts rant about digital media, you’ve come to the right place.

Mike: Hello and welcome to the Getting Granular podcast. This is your host, Mike Sherman. I’m a senior paid media expert here at Granular. I’m joined today with Mark Lee, who is also another analyst on our team. Hey, Mark, how’s it going?

Mark: Good, Mike. How are you?

Mike: I’m doing wonderful. I guess, to start things off here, why don’t you give just an intro on yourself and how you came to be in this space and what started the project here that we’re going to be talking about?

Mark: Yeah, so I am paid. I think my actual title is, I think, Measurement and Paid Media Manager here at Granular. I’ve been at Granular for just over two years, so I basically manage paid media clients, like everyone else on the team, but I also do pretty much all of the tagging, tracking, and then reporting. So I have my hands in basically everything at Granular, which I enjoy. So, yeah, how this project came about… What we’re talking about is the idea of blocking ads on Instagram and how that affects the engagement of the ads that you receive or the type of ads that you receive. So this idea, I’ve been talking about for quite a while. I’ve been doing this for quite a while, is essentially, to give you a background, I have my own personal Instagram, and I’m not a huge fan of ads, as surprising as it is, but I don’t think really anyone really enjoys ads, at least ones that are not very targeted to themselves or relatable to their interests. So maybe two years ago, I just started blocking these ads on these-

Mike: And by “blocking,” you mean you block the entire account?

Mark: Yeah, so when I say “block the ads,” I really just block the account that serves the ads. So if Best Buy showed me an ad, I would just block Best Buy because I knew that there’s no chance it could ever show me an ad again. So I basically just limited an entire advertiser from showing me anything. It wasn’t just hide this ad or report this ad and Instagram let me just hide it because of whatever reason I gave. I literally blocked the account, and it seems like a little bit of a scapegoat… or not a scapegoat. It’s this little hidden gem that I don’t know if Instagram really realizes, that if you block an advertiser, you won’t ever be served ads by them.

Other platforms, like Reddit, don’t really allow… They used to, but maybe they removed that. I’ve tried to, but they don’t allow you to block advertisers on Reddit, so it’s really interesting how Instagram allows you to do this, but essentially I just block the ad. Pretty much every ad I see on my personal Instagram, I’ll just block it.

And it has its pros and its cons, but essentially I kind of started it just out of an annoyance because I used to see the same ads over and over and over again. And I was just tired of seeing the same ad that had no interest to me, so that’s why I kind of started blocking them, and then it just became a thing where I just blocked pretty much everything. Usually, if there’s one-off ads, I keep scrolling, but oftentimes if I saw the ad more than once, so it was 2, 3, 4 times, even five or plus, I would block it because I was just tired of seeing it and I knew that that was the way that I was going to stop myself from seeing it.

Mike: Do you think there are a lot of other people like you that block the entire account or is it more that people just kind of scroll by the ad without blocking it?

Mark: I don’t know if many people do this. No one I’ve talked to really does this. I’ve talked to my friends and my wife’s friends. No one seems to do this. I seem to be very unique in this, and I think a lot of it is because I’ve talked to other advertisers, people who work in our space, and no one really else has done that, but I think they’re more cognizant of it, of that you can block ads or that sometimes they do. I say that no one’s really done it. I’m sure people in the advertising space that I’ve talked to… Some of them have said they’ve done it on one-off ads, but they don’t, I think, do it as much as I probably have. I don’t think a lot of people are doing it because I think a lot of people, one, probably don’t realize that it’s a thing you can do because you have to click on the profile or the IG page of whoever the advertiser is, and then you have to go hit those three dots and then hit, “Block account.”

That’s a lot of stuff to do to just block an ad. Then they go back to your feed and then keep scrolling, so some people might just, one, not think of it as an option or, two, people are just like, “Well, that’s a lot of work when I can really just scroll, and then problem solved.” I don’t know, I think it’s maybe a little bit of my OCD or my just hyper-fixation on these ads that just makes me block, but also, going back to it, I am an advertiser. I advertise on these platforms and I think I’m just more cognizant of the ads and how often the frequency is and all these metrics and being like, “Oh, I’ve been served this ad five times in the past week.” I just think about that stuff and I’m just annoyed by it because I think there’s a lot of bad advertising on the platforms.

Mike: But basically what it boils down to is that people do have the option of blocking right ads, and the algorithm picks up on it, essentially.

Mark: Yeah, I think it definitely picks up on it. If you think about it, if you have a pool, kind of like a funnel, you have all these different advertisers, you have electronic brands, car brands, whatever that are showing users ads and then you see, okay, well, half of those are blocked, and those are probably going to be showing the ads pretty frequently in the next timeframe going forward, and now I’ve blocked all those. Well, then Instagram has to find different advertisers to showcase because the ad slot that was going to be for Best Buy can’t be for Best Buy because I’ve blocked it, so it dwindles down that quality, I think, pretty quickly.

Mike: Yeah, and that was kind of the basis of this whole project. You came to me and you said, “This is what I do. I wonder what happens over time. If I started a new profile, what are the ads going to look like once I start frequently blocking them week over week?”

Mark: Right, because I have so much history on my personal Instagram page. So I’ve blocked so many ads. I actually just checked the list not long ago, and it’s probably 100 to 200 advertisers on this list. It’s quite-

Mike: Incredible.

Mark: And it’s big names, too. It’s not little advertisers. It’s, like I said, Best Buy, stuff like that. There’s some brands that I allow through, if it’s brands that I like, like Ikea or Subaru. I don’t really get those ads very often, maybe Ikea, but I usually allow some through, but my list is just extensive and it’s really big brands. And, yeah, I’ve been doing this and I thought, “This is an interesting idea because I don’t think many people are thinking about it or doing it.” And I brought it to your attention because I thought it was kind of cool, and we thought we should probably start with a brand new Instagram account that I curate to my interests so that we have some content or something to give the algorithm to basically say, “Okay, this is what this guy likes and we have a way to branch off that for advertising purposes.”

Mike: So basically, the parameters of this were, one, it was an entirely new account. You created it on the same phone that you use it for your personal account, but it’s entirely new and you set up the age parameters, I believe, or-

Mark: Yeah, so it’s kind of funny. We realized a few weeks in that my age was set to be… I was supposed to be 89 years old, and we thought that might absolutely skew our data, but as we’ll speak about, it didn’t really do that at all. I set myself to be just a male, like I said, my age… I think I was born in ’46, which I think is pretty funny. I don’t know where I set that. I almost think that might be a setting that was carried over from my personal Instagram. I’m not really too sure, but it didn’t really seem to make a difference at all, really, so we’re lucky with that, but, yeah, that’s what I set for my age and my gender.

Mike: And then what we did, essentially, was we started with the new account and we reviewed the ads, as soon as you started getting served them. We looked at them together, and from there, we started blocking every single ad that we saw, not only blocking the ad but the entire profile itself, and then every week just checking in to see how the relevance changed. And the way that we did that was by measuring each ad and agreeing on a 1 to 10 score of it in terms of its relevance. And at the end of every week, we would average out that score and compare that week over week. So to kind of summarize everything, we started a brand new account under Mark’s name. We updated the age and gender parameters on the profile. We scrolled through the feed that contained pages that Mark had already been following for some time and just copied those over to this new profile, and then began blocking, week over week.

Mark: And one thing to note is, when you create a new Instagram account, you really don’t get a single ad for the first week. It was pretty much like clockwork. I created it on a Wednesday and I wrote Mike maybe that Thursday, Friday, I think even maybe Monday, and I said, “I’ve not gotten a single ad yet. This may be a complete wash. I don’t know why,” because it’d been so long since I created a hobby Instagram account for myself maybe two years ago and I didn’t really scroll that much on that, so I don’t really think I thought of that. So I really thought of it when I noticed, “I’m not getting an ad,” and then, like clockwork, seven days went by, and all of a sudden, I was getting a ton of ads. And so we found that kind of interesting why…

I almost think it, one, takes time for it to understand what you like and what you’re interacting with, but also, I think… I don’t know this, but I think it wants to give you some type of introduction period where you can get hooked on it before it serves you ads. One of my biggest complaints with TikTok when I created a TikTok was I think I was served ads right away and none of was of interest to me. I hadn’t even created my own algorithm yet, so it was a little bit annoying, and I think that’s why Instagram really takes that week to learn you and maybe let you settle into the account.

Mike: Right, and that’s kind of where we understood that the age maybe didn’t matter so much, because the profiles we were following were related to your actual interests now, so it was a lot of scale modeling, lot of soccer profiles.

Mark: Yeah, it was scale modeling and soccer stuff. That’s really my two interests. I didn’t want to create a profile where I was liking key influencers or celebrities or stuff that I didn’t follow on my personal account because that’s completely skewing the data, so that’s really what we did. I didn’t have as many liked accounts or followed accounts in my new one, but it the key ones that I had interest for.

Mike: Right, and I think in that learning period from the content that you were following, that’s kind of what informed the first week of ads that we saw. I felt like most of the ad content we were seeing there was, one, pretty generalized and, two, somewhat related to your interests. So the first week it got a 5.7, which I think around a 5 we were deeming to be relevant but not to a point where you would want to act on it, so it was relevant to your interest but you didn’t really care about it.

Mark: I think we often gave higher scores for brands, but oftentimes it was five and up was usually [inaudible 00:14:41] either I know this brand or I’ve used this brand but I don’t use it now, or I know this brand and it’s not of an interest to me. Five and up was getting into the, “I have some understanding of this brand,” and anything below that was usually like I was never going to use it or I have no interest in it, but, yeah, the first week was definitely… We’ll talk through that list, but it was very much broad brands that I think most people would recognize, most people use. It’s almost like lifestyle brands and services.

Mike: That was my main takeaway, is that it just seemed like it could apply to anybody.

Mark: It seemed like a very millennial list. If we talk through them, one of the first ones I got was HBO Max. What millennial or anyone above that age has not known HBO Max or used HBO in general? We use HBO Max at home because I like to watch Curb Your Enthusiasm. There was other good shows on that, and I think the Righteous Gemstones was HBO. So, yeah, we have that, so things like that is… That gets a 10, because I use it. I like it. It’s highly relevant, but as it went down, some of the ads we were getting were less relevant, but I understand why I probably would’ve gotten the ad. I had Starbucks. I don’t drink Starbucks. And it makes sense. They’re probably making a big push for their fall drinks, so some of these were really relevant, like ZzzQuil. I don’t use ZzzQuil, the sleep aid, but I am a millennial and many millennials more frequently struggle with sleeping. NyQuil, that’s another one. These are just brands that I think everyone thinks about, US cellular, AT&T, all of this stuff.

Mike: And there are a handful of 10s in here, things that were incredibly relevant.

Mark: Yeah, AT&T was incredibly irrelevant because-

Mike: Hulu, Disney+, all things that you use regularly.

Mark: Yeah, and it’s all just streaming service dominated, but there’s a few that… HBO Max, Disney, the Athletic, which is a soccer related blog and podcast. I used to use them. I don’t really read their content as much anymore, but I used to use it. AT&T, I use their fiber optic internet. Hulu, Sirius, all of these are brands that I use. And if they’re not brands that I use directly, a lot of these were brands that create products that I currently use or they’re in my sphere of use.

Mike: So to summarize week one, more often than not, you were getting an ad that was somewhat relevant to your interests, so-

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. I would say so. Based off the list that we saw, it was either products I have used or products that are similar to things I’ve used. So if I was scrolling through Instagram that first week and I was seeing these ads, I don’t think I would… I’d probably block them regardless, but I don’t think I would be like, “Oh, these are insanely irrelevant to me.” I’d be like, “Okay, I know these brands.” These are-

Mike: Right. Say you were a normal person [inaudible 00:18:38]-

Mark: Right. If I was normal, then I would be like, “Okay. Yeah, these are ads that probably relate to what my interests are,” or-

Mike: And it’s crazy that it only took them just a handful of days to get that. And not to say that it nailed you, per se, but they really got it down to the pages that you were following and who you were as a person.

Mark: And I wonder how many of these advertisers are actually advertising very specific interests or if they’re doing what many advertisers do and just making it very broad because the signals that Facebook and Instagram really use, or lack thereof use, but they tried more broad targeting because Dr. Squatch, for example, was… They’re a soap maker. I use more boutique soaps, not this brand, but I do use companies that make soaps and I’m wondering, were they targeting somebody who’s interested in soccer? I doubt it. I find it interesting that I was even targeted because I imagine they’re doing some age targeting and I set my age to be… I’m 80 something years old, so I don’t know. It was very interesting, but, yeah, it is pretty interesting how it was able to figure out what my interests are or what kind of advertisers they should show.

Mike: So then we go from the most general, we block all of that, and we go into week two. We come back and-

Mark: Where it just starts spiraling.

Mike: And this is where it really starts getting interesting and it’s really insane how the quality diminished week over week. We gave week one a 5.7, and week two got a 2.6, so the drop off is pretty drastic there. If you’re one of those other advertisers and you get blocked right away, then the next week that people are getting ads, they’re not going to get anything related to you because the quality of the next advertisers were just so out of left field. And more often than not, you were scrolling and the ad was not entirely irrelevant, but it was noticeably different than your interests.

Mark: Yeah. We kind of noticed we might have an issue with the age targeting because of how I was seeing ads for AARP, which is probably not good to be seeing or not probably the right target Market. So I was seeing AARP and other brands like that that clearly don’t have an interest to me. I was starting to see Direct TV’s NFL Sunday Ticket, which I don’t watch football. I joke that I put it on for background noise if I’m cleaning the basement or, yeah, I just used to have it on as background noise. Ads for diabetes products, a lot of US Army… I had two different US Army ads.

Mike: And this is where we started to think that maybe they thought you were a student.

Mark: They also, yeah, probably thought I was a student because we were starting to… It was very much college football, but then a bank, I think that’s local maybe, Waterstone Bank… They were showcasing ads for student checking, and then US Army Reserves was… Their ad was student loan repayment, so it was very much really starting to dial in on this idea that I was a student, which I thought was funny, because I’m clearly not. So it’s weird because in the same week that we got student advertising, I was also getting AARP and Libre, which is, I believe, a diabetes blood tester.

Mike: Diabetes thing, yeah.

Mark: So it’s like, which am I? And A Place for Mom, that was another one.

Mike: Also-

Mark: Senior care living.

Mike: … these credit card signup or starting a new checking account, things of that nature.

Mark: Yeah, it was very much like Chime and these brands that have these… almost new age tech companies that have their bank checking and they have cards and stuff like that. So yeah, we’re getting down to that list, but I also got some more relevant stuff, Sling. I think what was interesting is that a lot of the advertisers that were advertising to me that were the right advertiser, like Sling, which I’ve used in the past… They were advertising things that weren’t of relevancy to me, so it was all NFL or college football, and it’s like I don’t watch that stuff, even fubo, which I think is… Fubo, I think, is a footballing term, a soccer term. The messaging was all football related, and I just find it interesting because I really wonder, why would you advertise college football messaging when every single thing that I’m liking, every single account that I like is soccer related? I didn’t like a single football related thing. I don’t follow any American football related stuff, so I don’t really quite understand why it was heavily focusing on college football, because fubo and Sling both offer soccer. I use ESPN+. I think ESPN+ was another one that we saw.

Mike: I think that was in the first round-

Mark: Oh, in the first round? Okay.

Mike: … when we blocked that.

Mark: I’ll add to it is that this idea that all of these services that offer soccer related content were all just showing me football related ads. And it is so not relevant, but also I have to remember that I think a lot of people in America who watch soccer probably also watch other sports, and I’m kind of unique in soccer’s the only thing I watch.

Mike: Yeah, I think once you blocked ESPN+ in that first week, then it was like, “How else can we get this guy?” And-

Mark: And I would never-

Mike: … all the other accounts were related ESPN accounts, but they were college football or NFL.

Mark: Right, and we put in the notes DirecTV… It was very student driven. It was probably relating to student messaging. And I know some of these ads even talked about deals for students, I think, was one of the other brands. So it was kind of all over the place on what it thought I was, and we could start to tell things are going south a little bit with its messaging and-

Mike: Yeah, I think we only had maybe two 10s here, out of the 20 or so ads we got.

Mark: I think one of them was just Liquid IV, which I use.

Mike: Mm-hmm. And so once you start blocking those ads, then going into week three, the algorithm had no idea what you were.

Mark: Yeah, didn’t really understand at all what I was interested in.

Mike: It was almost deranged in the advertising that you did get, and it was so out of left field, some of these.

Mark: Well, yeah.

Mike: And the entire week can be summarized with its score. We got a 1.5, and that’s barely relevant.

Mark: I knew that we were going to get a probably even worse score than week two when I recorded myself scrolling through the feed before we could review it. And so some of these almost have a similarity to week one, a lot of the advertisers, but it’s just worse, in that sense, but if we… One thing to note is, even though I would interact with this account every couple days to nurture, it took a while for the last week for me to even see any ads. I, when I was recording, almost paused recording because I was scrolling so long before I even got an ad, so I thought that was really quite interesting, but the ranking shows the delving into the nonsense kind of advertising that we got to, even getting to the point of slot advertisers, which, I always joke with people at Granular, is all I ever get on my personal Instagram, which I think is funny because I really did this to myself. I literally brought this on myself because I deleted all these ads and it’s funny because I deleted all these ads because I was tired of annoying advertisers, but now my Instagram account’s literally just slot machine ads, which is probably worse than if I just left the ads, but-

Mike: I’m looking at it right now, and there’s a stretch where you got three in a row of casinos, so it was Cash Man Casino, which was a betting service, Money Lion, which was instant cash opportunities, and then Heart of Vegas Slots at the end.

Mark: And it’s just all these flashy… And I’ve seen so many of these. I’ve seen probably 30 or 40 accounts. They have barely any following, and they just have insanely flashy ads. And it’s kind of just depressing how much these advertisers are actually on Facebook or Instagram and how many of the people they probably-

Mike: Right, so those were the final holes that I could poke through to find you, which is really interesting. Another interesting thing I thought was that, even at this level, you’re still getting crypto ads.

Mark: Yeah, I don’t think we got a single-

Mike: Given the popularity of it-

Mark: I don’t think we got a single crypto ad-

Mike: No.

Mark: … in any of the other weeks, but it’s weird because I almost wonder if the crypto… And we got trading.com, I think, was one of them, if those almost correlate with the slots. I don’t know.

Mike: Mm-hmm. I think it’s the same… It’s that same kind of person who’s-

Mark: Betting.

Mike: … yeah, that’s high risk, high reward kind of dealing.

Mark: Well, yeah, it makes sense because we had Fantasy Football betting sites too on here, No House Advantage. I don’t know the other one, but there was two betting services, of course, that were football related. So, yeah, and crypto and very random World Cat Boats, which was literally an ad for a probably multi-thousand, $100,000 dollar boat that I could buy, which is so irrelevant it’s wild because I would never ever buy a boat that’s worth more than, probably, my house, but so we were seeing a lot of these really irrelevant stuff.

But then we go back to this idea of we’re starting to see the cash, the banks. There was SoFi, which is huge, massive company, just for a checking account. I know that they don’t know this, but I would never have a checking account from such a large bank. I’d probably stay local. I don’t know if that’s a Midwest thing, but I wouldn’t go to a large brand like that. I’d stay local, so that’s not relevant. CashApp… It was for their a debit card. I would never, ever probably do that. There’s Hello Brigit, so I could get instant cash. It’s one of those services where you probably have a insanely high APR to repay that, but they’ll give you $250, and it just is not me at all. So, yeah, that’s kind of what we dove into the banking a little bit, but we were all over the place also with this.

Mike: Yeah, and so that pretty much concluded the entire experiment. I think if we had continued to block these ads, it would’ve just been more of the same, which is probably what you’re seeing on your own personal account.

Mark: Yeah.

Mike: So it only took us three weeks to get to this level of just blocking things to get to a point of complete irrelevance with the ads.

Mark: Right. I think two things that were peak irrelevance to me or, yeah, not having any relevance, and we laugh about it, was this KI supply company that was just advertising… I don’t even know what the machine was. It was like a bore machine.

Mike: It was for deeply inspecting in your car with a camera.

Mark: Yeah, it was that, which was a product, and then some company that was advertising presentation builders for teachers, which is funny because it said, “School is back in session,” so it’s like, am I a teacher now? And then Lashify, which is something to do with women’s eyelashes, which I’m not a woman. I almost wish I could sit down with someone on Facebook and be like, “Why did this advertiser find me? Why?” Because it doesn’t make any sense at all why some of these advertisers would get me. I just think Facebook just throws whatever they can out there, just to see what hits and-

Mike: Maybe they build off of that, but-

Mark: Yeah, it’s wild how bad it really got towards the end.

Mike: So my whole takeaway from this is that people know how to block ads, and if something’s irrelevant to them to a point where they find the messaging so out of left field, people will go ahead and block that. So I think my takeaway here, especially in our line of work, is that we need to do better with our advertising and make the copy more engaging because if you lose that first touch point with somebody and the copy just does not speak to them and your targeting is incorrect and everything like that, you’re never going to get that back again, and Facebook and Instagram will fill that slot in with something maybe even more irrelevant.

Mark: Yeah. One ad that I’ll speak to just because it kind of goes to what Mike is saying is that one of the ads was this company called Go Nitro. And Mike and I were laughing because in the ad, it had a very stock footage image and in the ad it did not… It just described the offer, but it didn’t describe what the product is. And I think advertisers need to realize that not everyone who’s seen your ad knows… Yeah, many of these advertisers, I knew the brand already, so I kind of knew what they were, but so many people don’t know what your brand is. And unless you make it very clear to people in the ad what the product is, they’re not going to have an… You can’t just show a product that probably nobody knows what it is and then just list your offer, because I was literally telling Mike, “I have no clue…” I was telling you, “I have no clue what this product even is.”

And I think that speaks to what you’re saying, and the advertisers need to make sure, when they’re writing copy, what are we speaking to? What is this… Do we make it known to the scroller, for that use of that term, the people scrolling… Do we make it clear to them what our product is if they’ve never heard of our brand? I think, at some point, like CashApp, most people know it, at least in the United States, but if you’re a newer brand or if you’re a smaller brand, you have to make it as clear as you can in your ad copy what you’re offering, whether it’s a visual thing or in the copy, because people are going to really split from you pretty quick if you don’t, because most people aren’t on Instagram for the ads. They’re on Instagram for the content, and people find ads intrusive, oftentimes, and annoying. And people probably would only like ads… I don’t block ads. I think, if it’s a relevant product to me on Instagram, I really don’t, because at some point it could be interesting or valuable to me, so if people are blocking this stuff, you probably aren’t hitting the right people.

Mike: Right, and if it’s bad enough in their feed… If they get to the week three stage, then that could just take somebody off of Instagram altogether, because if you’re getting slot machines in between the content and things like that, you could just be forced off the platform because it’s so bad.

Mark: Yeah, and it could be just a bad user experience. I don’t know my scroll time over the months and how much ads actually would impact that, but I think sometimes I roll my eyes when I see those ads, and oftentimes I will just close the app if I see something that’s so outrageously dumb. So, yeah, I think it has an effect on people if they were to do this or if they were to just see ads that are really relevant.

Mike: Right. That’s an entire platform that you’ll never get that new customer off of, just because their experience is so bad with ads that they could be forced to use anything else.

Mark: Yeah, and there’s so many other apps out there. People don’t need Instagram. I tell people this. I think the only reason… I wouldn’t even have an Instagram if I didn’t have family overseas that I want to stay in touch with and if I didn’t have my scale modeling Instagram, but I probably would delete my personal Instagram if it wasn’t for having family overseas that I want to connect with. So I think it speaks to the fact that, really, you have to give people a reason to stay on the platform, and some people will find relevant products on Instagram and it has the ability to do that. It is two part. It’s on Instagram to make sure that they’re serving the right ads to people, but it’s also on the advertiser to make sure that their targeting is pretty focused.

Mike: Mm-hmm. I think that’s a good place to wrap it up. We had a lot of fun on this project and we’re hoping that you, as the listener, do too. We’ll be accompanying this with another blog post, just kind of reviewing our process in a little bit more depth, but it was a fun experiment and I think we learned a lot from it. And I think a lot of other people will review this and go back to their own advertising and make sure that they’re touching on some of the points that we talked about here and, moving forward, maybe will update their own ad copy to make sure that people are still getting relevant info.

Mark: Yeah, and I think I kind of push people to review the ads that they’re seeing on their own Instagram. If you were to rank it, how relevant is this to you? I’m not saying block everything. I think that’s almost an extreme thing to do, what I’ve done, but I don’t know, I would implore people to just have an interest in what kind of ads you’re seeing. How relevant are they? Not that there’s a whole lot you can do if you realize these ads are very relevant, but I think it would just be interesting for people to do a little bit of an experiment on their own.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. All right. Thanks, Mark. This was a great discussion.

Mark: Yeah. Thanks, Mike.