Dive Brief:

• High-end carmaker Lamborghini is among a bevy of luxury brands that are traditionally hesitant about wading into digital, but have found a home on Instagram. 
• However, now that the photo-sharing platform has opened up advertising to all brands, this super-luxury brand worries that the noise — including advertisements for, say, a bag of chips — will drown them out.
• “The feed is just so noisy. There is, like, five times more paid as native content," Lamborghini Social Media Manager Dario Salvelli told Digiday. "We’re basically renting this media. We’re not paying anything for it, but we want to know who we’re next to.”

Dive Insight:

Given that social media allows for better targeting at scale than other mediums, and usually at less expensive prices, many brands are flocking to the channel. But the higher number of advertisers means a higher volume of ads with which to compete.

In theory, high-end brands, such as Lamborghini, market to a very specific audience, so new neighbors popping up in consumers' news feeds should not dent their reach.

However, the the influx of advertisers has created a situation where a high-end brand might see their ad or native content placed next to ads from companies like Walmart. But since Instagram taps into Facebook's data sets and targeting capabilities, it increases the value for brands looking to reach a specific group.

According to Digiday, citing data from SocialBakers, Lamborghini's Instagram account has garnered six times the interactions in the last year than in 2014. The automaker, which Digiday points out does not pay for advertising, has seen its follower count swell to more than 2 million, up from about 550,000 in January 2015.

Fashion and beauty brands have generally found success on the social photo-sharing app, whose visual ad offerings, like carousel ads, give retail marketers an artistic canvas to showcase their products. In the last year, these brands have raised their digital ad spending, according to a study by MediaRadar, with 53% more luxury fashion brands advertising online during September this year than during the same month last year.

For social media-ready luxury brands, one route they can take to grow their online footprint is to enlist celebrities and social media influencers for their campaigns.

“Each brand needs to strike a balance between exclusivity and inclusiveness," James Lovejoy, an analyst at Brandwatch, told the New York Times. He gave the example that "when Rihanna wears Dior in an Instagram photo, the reach she gets might not be exactly Dior’s consumer base, but she certainly attracts a wider audience."