Instagram wanted to introduce Interests, a new feature allowing their billion users to follow hashtags the same way they follow people. While hashtag use is ubiquitous in social media, Interests represented a huge platform, giving users a low barrier to entry for exploring their passions. If a user followed a hashtag for streetwear, relevant content would automatically populate their feed along with content from their family, friends, and influencers.

Interests is a powerful tool for discovering the expansive world within Instagram. The brief was to bring that to life for teens, Instagram’s most critical growth target. The challenge was connecting with teens globally through common interests while showing them Instagram is also a place to see things they’ve never thought of before.

Our objective was showing the same potential for Interests that the Stories feature exhibited when it was launched—a killer way for teens to discover the world and themselves.

With Instagram's Community Lab, we found a bespoke, relevant collection of Interests pulled from the exponentially expanding database of the most recognizable visual platform in social media. We started with a series of films, each featuring two similar sounding, but not at all the same, Interests with a surprising reveal. The specificity of each Interest conveyed the sense that if it exists out there, it’s probably an Interest on Instagram. And if it’s an Interest on Instagram, you can become a part of it and find your kind.

We later brought the platform into the real world with Freaky Sneaks where we partnered with shoe influencer The Shoe Surgeon to turn popular Interests into elaborate sneakers that we presented at Sneaker Con. We made films for each of these creations that also juxtaposed two Interests and served them to teens with an invitation to follow their own Interests.

With over a billion users posting about a seemingly infinite number of Interests, no human could simply thumb through hashtags and get a true sense of what was relevant to teens. Only machine learning could algorithmically sift through this deep sea of information to identify patterns, producing needles in haystack after haystack.

Follow Hashtags Films: From 4/17 to 5/14, we partnered with Instagram to launch 44 assets across on-platform and off-platform media targeted to high school and college students within the US and UK. The goal was to highlight the depth and breadth of interests on Instagram. Twenty-two assets were delivered as paid media across Instagram stories and 20 assets were delivered through publishers-direct partnerships across Instagram and .com properties. The CTAs directed users to the Instagram app and the hashtag page of the hashtag featured in the ad.

Freaky Sneaks Films: Our audience loves to follow sneaker content on Instagram. From 5/28 to 6/24, we partnered with influencers across 7 key interest verticals to create 7 interest-inspired custom shoes to drive hashtag follows on Instagram. The shoes were featured in on-platform ads and at Sneaker Con Chicago. We created 17 paid-media assets and partnered with 14 influencers to extend our reach.

Specifically, this campaign delivered 21.4 million paid impressions to teens and college students in the US and UK and drove a “significant lift in awareness for ‘follow hashtags’ from 74% to 78%.” This is critical because with over one billion users, making Instagram desirable for teens to sign up and become new users is the best growth strategy. Seeing a significant lift in awareness validated that what we found from the machine learning data was based in real teen behavior.