Instagram has marketers salivating - FT.com If marketers had their way, Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app, would be filled with Insta-ads. Dazzled by Instagram's explosive growth and the opportunity to exploit images to promote brands, marketers are eager to infiltrate the Facebook-owned app. They also are salivating at the prospect for Instagram to help them connect with consumers on mobile devices, which dominate a growing share of people's time but lack a proven ad model. But marketers will need to tread carefully given the brouhaha set off this week when Instagram first announced then later backtracked on changes to its terms of service and privacy policy that would have granted advertisers rights to use the photos and data of users. Instagram, which lets people jazz up photos with artsy filters and share them with friends, faced protests from users and celebrities like reality star Kim Kardashian, who ranks as the app's most popular user with more than 5.7m followers. I really loved Instagram.;- (I need to review this new policy. I don't think it's fair," read a message she posted to her 16.9m Twitter followers on Tuesday. By late Thursday, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom said in a blog post that the service was reverting to its original policies but would alert users to policy changes once advertising plans had been developed. Indeed, Mr Systrom reminded users amid the flurry of criticism that Instagram was created to become moneymakingng business and that advertising is a strategy to do so. While Instagram has yet to sell ads, 60 per cent of the world's top 100 brands already operate Instagram accounts and regularly post original or user-submitted photos, according to a new study from research firm Simply Measured. "Anytime you can show your product or brand naturally in use or being enjoyed - so the spontaneous photo of a handsome jock drinking a soda or of a good looking family driving their new car - is marketer's gold," says Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, the WPP-owned digital marketing firm. Starbucks, for instance, ranks among the top brands on Instagram with 1m followers and regularly posts artistic pictures that showcase its love for all-things coffee. The photos typically solicit tens of thousands of "likes" and hundreds of comments. A recent black-and-white photo displayed a French coffee press next to an open book and a mug decorated with the words "peace. love. coffee." the caption read: "Relax and enjoy the moment, we're almost there. #metime #ChristmasBlend." "What we love about Instagram, for example, is that these networks use authentic or curated images that really give us an ability to build our brand, connect with our customers in a way that's completely unique for Starbucks," Adam Brotman, chief digital officer at Starbucks, said during an investor conference earlier this month. Other marketers already are tapping Instagram to crowd-source images for their marketing campaigns. A recent promotion for Taco Bell's Doritos Locos Taco, which is made with the nacho cheese-flavoured chip, entered users into a contest if they took Instagram photos of the taco. A subsequent TV commercial featured a montage of the Instagram photos. Taco Bell informed users that, by submitting the photos, they were granting Taco Bell rights to the images. Marketers" interest in Instagram could help jump-start Facebook's overall advertising business, after the social network agreed earlier this year to pay $730m for the app. Facebook has struggled to convince marketers of the value of its advertising and meanwhile has faced challenges making money on its popular mobile application. Advertising company WPP, for instance, said its clients this year would spend just $300m of the $400m they had budgeted for Facebook. As Instagram rolls out its ad business, it will face the perennial problem plaguing social networks of convincing marketers to pay for services they previously tapped at no cost. "That is a really challenging nut to crack for social media," said Sarah Hofstetter, president of Dentsu's 360i digital marketing firm. Brands are struggling to understand why they pay for something they previously got for free. Instagram also is likely to run up against steep competition from other social networks that focus on images, such as Pinterest and Flickr. Instagram now has 100m about users, nearly four times the 27m it had in April. But its debacle this week shows that there's no guarantee that Instagram will remain a leader in the category among users and advertisers eager to reach them, ad executives said. Sean Muzzy, chief executive of WPP's digital ad firm Neo@Ogivly North America, said "Who is going to win in that whole thing is still pretty wide open."