Instagram
Branded Content
Instagram’s Branded Content is designed to foster seamless collaboration between creators and brands—a rare win-win ecosystem. During my time at Instagram, I contributed to innovating and refining the branded content format, streamlining the creation process for both creators and brands, and reinforcing safety measures to build trust on both sides. This work was made possible through close collaboration with an exceptional cross-functional team, including product managers, engineers, data scientists, content designers, and product marketers.
My roles for Instagram Branded Content
Lead product designer
As a lead product designer, I implemented the designs of the product. Working collaboratively with cross functional partners, we established roadmaps and set goals for the team. I also innovated on the features and simplified tedious workflows through collaborating with product marketers who worked directly with creators and brands.
Why use branded content?
Branded content enables creators to maintain authenticity while being transparent with their audience about partnerships. By openly sharing collaborations, creators can make a living through partnerships while staying true to their personal brand.
Creator experience
Instagram is primarily a mobile experience. From creation to content management, all the features of branded content are required to be mobile first.
Mobile formats
Branded content allows creators to showcase partnerships across their feed, stories, and reels–offering versatile formats to authentically share their narrative while integrating a brand’s products seamlessly into their content.
Remix format
Leveraging the content of brand, creators can create exciting side-by-side content for branded content. Aiding discovery of a creator's content and maintaining the quality of production.
Adding a brand
Creation of the branded content should be as easy as tagging a friend. Once the brand has created the partnership, the creator should be able to easily create the content.
All routes of promotion
A promotion can be created in multiple ways at Instagram and Meta. We had to ensure all possible routes were possible for either the creator or the brand to promote the content.
Co-creation with the brand
The benefit of branded content is that the brand can also provide the content that is associated with the creator. We had to ensure the creator has the proper ways to verify the content for the partnership.
Partnership approval
Enabling a branded content between a creator and a brand opens up discovery of the creators content to both parties audiences. For this, a formal partnership is required. When a brand initiates a partnership, a creator can accept the partnership within the app.
Brand experience
For brands that manage multiple partnerships with creators and numerous promotional campaigns, we worked with the Meta Business Suite and Meta Ads Manager to effectively build in branded content tools.
Adding a creator partner
What used to be a tedious process established in ambiguous sections of the business suite, we worked with numerous cross functional teams at Meta and Instagram to ensure the best visibility for brands to manage their partnerships in the right surfaces. This way partnerships that creators can see in the Instagram app can be requested directly by the brands.
Ads manager efficiency
One of the most confusing flows for brands was the numerous methods of creating a branded content promotion in Meta's Ads Manager. Throughout the years, and feature build up, there were ambiguous ways for a brand to create a promotion in partnership with a creator. With the help of user research and a deep understanding of Ads Manager we were able to establish a single method to compenstate for all the numerous methods.
Instagram branded content results
200%+
monthly revenue
Through format innovations and improvements, as well as efficiencies made for creators and brands, promotional revenue for branded content was doubled during my time at Instagram.
Working on Instagram’s Emerging Business team was an incredible professional journey. I had the opportunity to collaborate with a stellar cross-functional team, navigating complex processes to ensure that every feature was crafted with a clear focus for our specific user audience. It felt like steering a massive ship—aligning every part of the organization while keeping the vision intact. I learned the importance of patience, communication, and precision in building tools that resonate with both creators and brand partners.
Selected works
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