You won this one Mom.

It was to my Mother's joy and my absolute horror I discovered I could zoom in on Instagram posts this past Thursday. I was a bit stressed out about the fact my “zoom it out and throw a filter on it” method for posting bad photos was beginning to fail. I played around for the feature for a little while, but as the weekend moved on I quickly forgot about it and don’t think I used it a single other time. I imagine I will use the feature a few more times in the future, mostly to harass friends, but otherwise won’t be zooming in and inspecting every post and comes through my feed.

But just in these few days I have noticed certain users taking advantage of this feature, advertisers to be exact. I’ve seen a couple of ways that different companies have been incorporating the zoom feature into their Instagram advertisements. One way through a type of scavenger hunt, where they have their products placed smaller so you have to zoom in to find them. An example of this I saw was a desk with a ton of stuff on it that you had to zoom in to see all the details and product placement. Another way is the idea of zooming in on quality or options, mostly I have seen this with food products. Cheesecake factory ran an ad with nine different slices of cheesecake, each of which you could zoom in on and check out the flavors and details.

I think it’s really smart of these brands to stay on top of the most current features and incorporate them into their advertisements. This shows the brands are relevant and keep up with fast moving technology.  My only concern is as I mentioned before, how many people are really taking advantage of this zoom feature on every post they view. I don’t think I would zoom in on these ads unless prompted in the caption, which means I would have to stop and read the caption, and that doesn’t frequently happen. By minimizing the size of your product are you prompting users to zoom in and interact, or scroll through without even seeing what you are selling?