Instagram's Adam Mosseri on algorithms, AI slop, and how to beat TikTok

0:10Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore. I'm Max Taney. I'm the media editor at Semaphore. And with me, as always, is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Ben, how's it going? Do you like our new theme music? What do you think about it? You know, I think it's great. I think it captures the sophisticated and yet engaged sensibility of this show that we told the AI to write for us. I have to stop you right there because I don't want the audience to even think for a second that this was done by AI. A human made those sounds that you were just hearing. The audience also probably picked up the fact that I am much more invested in the theme music of the show than you were.

0:47That's why you're the executive producer, Max. That is true. That is why I'm making all the big calls on the show. But this week, we are so excited. I didn't make this call. You actually did. Ben, you booked our guest. We are extremely thrilled to have on the CEO of Instagram, Adam Masseri. They have just rolled out this interesting new feature in which you can basically watch Instagram reels on your television now. Ben, this plays a little bit into something that we have been talking about a lot on the show, it seems like, this year and recently. Yeah, you know, I've been trying to get Adam on for a long time because he has been right at the middle of the Facebook meta Instagram revolution in media.

1:28He ran newsfeed for Facebook when I met him. He's, you know, very close to Mark Zuckerberg. But he also comes out of design. And I always, he may take this as an insult, but I always thought he was better at talking to East Coast media types than many of his Silicon Valley peers and seemed to understand where the media industry, where the news industry are coming from. And now he has walked like directly into our kill zone of, is everything becoming television? Yeah, I mean, we're obviously really interested to ask him about those new features, but also just broadly what Instagram is in 2025. I feel like I've been on my own kind of personal Instagram journey.

2:06It used to be just like this thing that I had on private for me and my friends. And I would post pictures of my personal life that I didn't necessarily want everybody to see or just wanted only my friends to see and, you know, kind of would post jokes or whatever. And now it's like my own personal branding platform. And I think they've torqued it to be that way. So we really want to ask him like where Instagram is now compared to where it was five years ago and also where it's going. It's going to change a lot with AI and with the ways in which short form video has just exploded. So it should be a really interesting conversation.

2:40Yeah, at some level, the question really is just like, what is social media and really is social media still a thing? We can ask him those questions. Yes, absolutely. We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with Adam Aseri right after this.

2:57Hi, I'm Joshua Spania, VP of Marketing at Google. And you might assume I have all the answers when it comes to marketing. The truth, I'm just as curious to learn, discover the answers to everything as everyone else. We are living through a total reset of our marketing industry. The old maps don't work, which means we get to chart a new path forward. It's dynamic, it's fast-paced, and honestly, there's never been a more exciting time to be in marketing. That is why we've started a new podcast, Frontier CMO. It's from Think with Google, and I promise it's not just a bunch of corporate waffle. I'm sitting down with people who really know what's going on, CMOs, creators, technologists, the lot, and we're having a proper, unfiltered chat about what's working, and quite frankly, What isn't?

3:51These are your notes from the Frontier. So do me a favor. Search for Frontier CMO wherever you get your podcasts or watch us and subscribe on YouTube.

4:08Okay, Adam, we are so excited to have you here with us. I wanted to start out with kind of a basic question, but one that Ben and I were both interested in, which is, what is Instagram in 2025? I feel like it's changed a lot over the past few years, and it's probably going to change a lot more over the next few. How would you describe what Instagram is in 2025? So the mission has been for a long time to inspire creativity that connects people. But how people connect with their friends, how people create, how people entertain themselves has changed a lot. So the how changes constantly. And I know that can be a lot sometimes for people who are used to things one way.

4:47I think the most important things to understand about Instagram in 2025 is that the primary way that people actually share with friends is through messages. It's not through stories or feed. And the primary way that people entertain themselves and consume public content is video. So it's a lot of DMs and it's a lot of reels right now. And then the next biggest surface is probably stories, particularly for younger people. So broadcast sharing, which is a term we use for sharing with lots of people at once is still a thing. But that's, for most people, primarily a stories pattern, not a feed pattern.

5:24Would you call this thing a social network? Yeah, for sure. I think one of our strengths is the fact that you have your friends there. The way I think about it is most media or attention businesses have content that is differentiated, which is why you go, and then more content, which might be why you stay. so you know maybe you subscribe to time warner when i was a kid on the east coast to get to be able to get access to hbo or maybe now you subscribe to hbo to get access to a specific show for instagram that hook for a lot of people is friend content um so and their friends so it might be sharing their biggest moments or sharing lightweight moments and stories or might be them just sending them funny comedy clips and dms but that's like a real motivator for people to show up.

6:11And then they can stay and spend a lot more time on public content. So we had actually like sort of an etiquette question on this front from a Mixed Signals listener, Kyle Chaka of The New Yorker, who wanted me to ask you, should people still post about their daily lives on there or just DM their friends in private? I think posting about your daily lives is totally, totally inbound, but it's particularly a stories thing. It's not so much a feed thing. Like there's a, like posting twice to feed in the same day as a normal person is like a little bit sort of outside of the lines of Instagram etiquette.

6:45They call it, you know, double Instaing or double Instagramming. So Adam, it's funny you bring that up because one of our previous guests on the show, Jonah Weiner, who writes the excellent newsletter, Blackbird Spy Plane, he had a post a few months back about how it was very transgressive these days to do the kind of 2012 style daily posting just on grid. And that that was like kind of a cool thing that people have been doing again? Yes, that definitely happens. I think what is old is new is, again, is definitely a bit of a pattern. We've seen this with like disposable cameras. What's a bit of a broader theme than daily life to grid is the aesthetic has just changed a lot.

7:26People think of Instagram, they think of hyper-polished, photoshopped, high-saturation landscapes, et cetera. But the content that is, I think, driving the most cultural relevance right now is kind of the opposite of that. It's like unprocessed, much more raw, much less, you know, photo dumps. I think people in a world where they're inundated with hyper produced content are gravitating more and more towards content that at least feels more authentic. I've been chasing you to come on this show for a while, but you finally had some news to make, which is Instagram rolling out an app on Amazon fire.

8:02We'll have channels like news, entertainment. And, you know, a huge theme of this show is that everything is becoming television. And like, that really sounds to me like, wow, Instagram is now becoming television. What's going on? So I don't know that I would say that Instagram is becoming television, but we should definitely go deeper into that. I think that we're just seeing how important TV is as a format. And it's just a place where people spend time, right? And historically, we've been fighting, with some pretty fierce competition for people's time on mobile phones. But obviously, there's an immense amount of time spent on TV, particularly here in the US, but also in Western Europe, also in India, where we're not even really showing up.

8:45And some of our competition is showing up with force. So for us, it's a bit more about making sure that we're not ignoring such an important media or medium. And honestly, I think we're late to the game. So we've got a lot of catching up to do. obviously plenty of people are watching youtube on their tvs and we'll get to that but when did you decide that this was something that both that you wanted to do and that also that instagram could do on television in a way that would feel fun and interesting and you know good for the brand i guess we've wanted to do it for a long time i think it's about when we really decided to actually do it tv is difficult to build for there's a lot of fragmentation for all these different devices it's a completely new format obviously for us the input device is really difficult.

9:27So how do you, and we've all fought typing to our TV, you know, your passcode when you can't dictate, you know, so all these kinds of fun challenges that we're not used to. We wanted to start on a one or two platforms to start, but then quickly expand and we'll see. This is look, the first version that we're announcing now is really just that it's a first version was we're going to learn a lot. I'm sure we'll get a bunch of things wrong, but we're going to iterate quickly. The other thing I would say is over the course of the year, it became clear that But though I wish we had done this years ago, the technology is changing in a way that is going to make this a lot easier.

10:02I think of you, Adam, like, and maybe I realize that you might take this sort of as an insult, but like as sort of a something. I love that preamble. Before you even tell me, I just want to talk to you, tell you how. But it does feel to me like the things that you have spent a lot of your career building, recommendation engines, newsfeed, the structures around Instagram and threads are technological. but there's something about this like television experience which is leaned back fundamentally that feels more like welcome to the media business adam i mean do you feel like you've crossed a threshold here if there was a threshold i feel like i've been stepping over it slowly for a long time i don't know if there's like a rubicon so to speak but i do feel like this is going to be humbling i think that we're going to learn a lot that we don't know and i think that's going to be healthy.

10:50I'm constantly concerned about our blind spots. What are the things that we should be concerned about or thinking about that we are not? I mean, are you concerned that what it's going to be is that like high production scripted dramas, like beat out UGC and next thing you know, you're like competing with Netflix to buy the remake of The Office? I hope not. I really don't want to get into that business. I think the more likely tension would be, I don't know that this will be the case, but we have been very explicitly and intentionally focused on short form video on Instagram. My belief is that connecting people with their friends and short form video can be really symbiotic, you know, because you see short form videos you want to send to your friends.

11:34For me, it's, you know, comedy skits I send to my brother or, you know, things about architecture art that I send to my sister. She's a designer. And then we have conversations. So those two things are, you know, they help each other. And then I think short form and long form video can be symbiotic. And, you know, you watch a couple short form mid-aisman, you watch a long one, you go back to a couple of shorts. I do not know that connecting people with your friends and long form video can be symbiotic. I'm a little bit worried they're too far apart. You watch a 20 minute video, which doesn't even seem like long, but in the Instagram world is very long.

12:05That's a lot of reels that you wouldn't have seen and sent to a friend or seen a story from a friend or send a message to somebody you know or love. So I think that if this, one way this might fail, we'd like to do these pre-mortems, like how might this not work before we even find out, is that it might turn out that maybe, like you said, we'll need premium content to work. I don't know. I think YouTube is not big into premium. And YouTube on TVs is much bigger than YouTube TV for TVs, as far as we can tell. But it might be that we need long-form video. And then if we need long-form video, what does that mean for us?

12:39because that's literally been a market we've explicitly decided not to enter historically. So before we actually get into YouTube, because I can just, I can feel Ben chomping at the bit to get into it because we've done so much this year. He perked up. I want to ask like just a very basic question here because I think a lot of our listeners are probably thinking about this. How do you envision people using this? Like, okay, so I've hooked up Instagram now to my television. I have an, we've got Amazon Fire. This is awesome. Now what happens? We're just, we're watching some reels in a row. oh, why wouldn't we just do it on our phone?

13:10What is the habit supposed to look like? I don't think we know yet, but I have two different ideas in mind. One is much more like how you use Instagram, but more passive. So, you know, we all have been in a place where we want to sort of hack our mood or watch some funny videos or whatever it might be. And we sit back and relax and it might just be nicer on a bigger screen, you know, when you're home alone. The one that I also think will be less frequent, but maybe more delightful and exciting and valuable would be something that was more social. I mean, I don't know if you do this, but I definitely have been in a bunch of situations where I really want to watch a bunch of things with a friend.

13:47So with my brother, it's usually comedy because we both just love stand-up, and I think laughing is just underrated. With other people in my life, it's other topics where we sort of wanted to go deep and rabbit hole together on something. I think, this is often isn't in the first version, but I think it could be pretty exciting to do that, either in a directed way where you say, here, this is the kind of content I want. And as content search gets better, we could deliver on that. And then eventually in a more personalized way where we're like, hey, you know, you two are in the room. Do you want a feed that's just based on both of your interests?

14:18I don't know if you've ever used Blend, but it's a pretty funny way to get a little insight into your friend's interests. Do you see a world in which people are creating content for Instagram on TV? This was something that came up when we were talking to Neil Mohan earlier this year, where he was talking about how a lot of their users on YouTube were creating content specifically that was meant to be watched on your television screen in your living room. Is that kind of the goal? Do you want to get to that place? I think that's not the goal, but I think that would be a sign of success. I think that if the volume of usage gets so high that people would actually bother to create content specifically for Instagram on TV, that would be a sign that we had reached scale.

14:59But I think that's step three or four. I mean, we have to get something out the door, then we have to make it good, then we have to scale it across all the platforms, then we have to figure out how to grow it. So there's a lot of steps between now and then, but that would be, I think, a nice signal that we had reached enough scale that it mattered enough to somebody to even consider doing that. I guess I have almost sort of the opposite question, Adam, which is like, it feels like there was a period, and you know, I think Max and I are both, like you are veterans of the first pivot to video for Facebook Watch, in which people were making bespoke contents for each platform.

15:32And at BuzzFeed, we felt like we had real expertise on what worked better on Pinterest versus Facebook or whatever. Now, I think a lot of creators are treating these as identical channels in the same vertical video goes on. I mean, this is certainly true for us. And we were pleased to see when you subscribe to Semaphore on Instagram for a video, I do think we posted the identical video to TikTok and to Shorts. True story. I mean, that sort of threatens to commoditize you in a way. Yeah. So there's signals in both directions. So we care a ton about creators. I mean, the whole identity of the brand is really around creativity.

16:07We have seen that creators every year seem to diversify more and more gradually, but steadily. So they use more and more platforms. There's less and less creators who are just completely loyal to one platform. We have heard both. We have heard from some people that they have a lot of success in just reposting the same content across platforms. We've also found other creators who really believe deeply in the fact that they've got different audiences on different platforms and they find a lot of success in catering their content to those audiences. Sometimes it's just slicing the same content up, but often it's just completely different content.

16:44I think it probably varies by vertical, and I don't have a great sense of which verticals that's true for and false for and why. But I definitely hear both a lot. But it is very true that creators are becoming savvy to the fact that it's valuable for them to not have all of their eggs in one basket, to not be beholden to one algorithm or one company or one risk of being deplatformed and are trying to make sure that they have just a diverse business, which I think just makes sense. In terms of the risk to us, yeah, there's risk there. There's things that both TikTok and YouTube are better than us at in the context of video creation and distribution.

17:24I think TikTok is the best in the industry at breaking new talent from small names. I think YouTube is the best in the industry at paying out creators at scale in a sustainable way. I think one of our unique strengths, though, is we are often not only a video creator's distribution platform, but also a consumption one. I think a lot of creators use us as a home base to consume content, not just that's public, but also from their friends, to message people, to network. I can't tell you how many creators I've met from how many different industries that have made really important professional connections because they follow people whose tastes that they love and then end up collaborating on something from musicians to journalists to film to authors.

18:09So even non-visual industries. Do you get into bidding wars for creators with either TikTok and YouTube or with Amazon and Netflix or with CBS and ABC? Like, do you feel like you're in a competition, whether monetary or otherwise, for their attention and time? I can't think of any bidding wars where there's literally something that we are bidding on. But we are certainly in a lot of competition with particularly YouTube and TikTok for creators' time and attention. And I think of creators as particularly important because I feel like across a lot of industries, power is shifting from institutions to individuals.

18:49And so they seem to be getting more and more important over time. They punch above their weight in terms of engagement as well. But just think about how relevant athletes are relative to the teams they play for compared to 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Relevant journalists are relative to the mastheads that they work under compared to 10, 20, or 30 years ago. So now, obviously, AI is a big topic and there's a lot of concern around being disintermediated or competing with AI. But I think people fundamentally really want to hear from other people. And so we still feel like creators are one of the most important audiences for us across industries.

19:25Well, we have a lot that we want to get to with Adam Masseri, but we have to take a short break. We'll be back right after this.

19:38In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I spoke with Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about what he saw at CES. So Josh, you were at CES at the beginning of this year. Why does that event matter for CMOs? So CES gives us a real view into how people are going to be living their lives and spending their money in two, five, even 10 years' time. I know from the outside, it looks like a giant toy show. There's smart rings and foldable laundry robots and flying cars. But I was chatting with Shelley Palmer, who I interviewed for my new podcast. He's an AI visionary and tech leader.

20:17And he swears by, and I agree with him, that the ability to see patterns amongst all the gadgets is actually really, really compelling for near term and into the future. So what did you learn from that conversation? Well, the gadgets aren't really the thing. stuff gets announced, some of it launches, some of it doesn't launch. What you're really looking for are business model changes, the new paradigms that are emerging. So two that I saw and we spoke about, one is around agentic commerce. Google announced during CES and just after CES, a whole bunch of partnerships with Shopify, with Walmart, with Target, around agentic commerce.

20:55Super interesting building the new protocols for machines doing the shopping for you where appropriate. And then separately, I also saw a lot of expansion of what you might call intelligent ecosystems. These are technologies from different companies coming together, meshing together to enable you to do more interesting and engaging things. And again, with Google and Gemini leading the way, they're really fascinating forerunners of where we're all going to be in the near and medium term. And where can people listen to the whole thing? You can listen to my conversation with Shelley Palmer in my new podcast, Frontier CMO, on YouTube or wherever you download podcasts, or you can sign up for my weekly newsletter over on LinkedIn.

21:38Great, thanks, Josh.

21:50You were on Peter Kafka's podcast a few months ago, and you said something which was interesting to me. You said that TikTok was more aggressive on data in general. And just now you mentioned that TikTok is good at kind of breaking new stars or new people. What did you mean by more aggressive on data? And why do you think TikTok has been better at kind of breaking new people? What is it specifically, do you think? So those are related, but two different things happening on data. I mean, I'll give you some examples of things that they do that I don't think anybody else in the industry does. If you message a TikTok video to a friend, that creates a unique link so that they can track it.

22:29And you can message in any other app. You don't have to use TikTok. So if I messaged Ben an encrypted message with a TikTok link in WhatsApp, and he opened it and it opened up his TikTok, TikTok knows that I sent it to him. And it recreates a message thread in TikTok, but as if I had messaged Ben directly on TikTok. Wow. That is a very aggressive thing to do in an encrypted messaging world. Yeah. They are all in on those types of tactics. You know, that's about data, but that's also about growth. On breaking talent, I think that they deserve a lot of credit. Even before ByteDance bought Musical.ly, Alex and Musical.ly were very leaned in on this idea of not reinforcing the existing establishment, but helping new talent grow.

23:17In the world of ranking, there's something called exploration-based ranking which is just more difficult it is much easier for me to find something that i think you're gonna like that i know a million other people like then to find something that i think you're gonna like that you know only like a hundred people have even seen but if you do the latter more interesting things happen and i think you really are kind of living up to the whole promise of the internet and niche interests so they did a lot and i don't need to go into the details unless you want me to, on exploration-based ranking systems really early that the rest of the industry has caught up on.

23:51Okay, this is what I wanted to ask about because I'm very knowledgeable about exploration-based ranking in the sense that I learned about it an hour ago when I was prepping for this interview and listening to you on another podcast. But Ben, do you know what exploration-based ranking is? I do not. The basic idea is that you want to give every piece of content a chance, regardless of whether or not it's from a big established account or not. It is much easier for us to drive up engagement by showing a lot of photos and videos from Selena Gomez and The Rock because they're so big and we know so many people like them.