YouTube, Twitter, Instagram Work on Stealth Advertising

AFP: The quandary for those who run social media networks is how to make money on them without antagonizing and thus losing users through distracting ads. The answer — for Twitter, YouTube and Instagram — is to slip in some stealthy ads camouflaged to look like posts from listed contacts. Each of the networks has in-house teams whose job is to think up ways to advise brands on how to sneak their marketing into members’ feeds. At Google-owned YouTube, the effort is called “Zoo.” Instagram uses the “Creative Shop” of its parent company Facebook. Twitter’s name for it is the relatively straight-forward “Brand Strategy.”