Instagram Threads - Where have we heard that before?

With the upcoming launch of Instagram Threads today, the internet is abuzz with articles on it being a “Twitter killer” with a launch well timed to take on Twitter while it’s going through a rough phase under the new leadership. Netizens can only wait and watch to see how this pans out and while the billionaires discuss locations of an actual cage match on a separate thread, we also get a sense of déjà vu – Instagram Threads, where have we heard that before?

Let’s take a journey back to 2019, when Corona was just a nice beer, there was no Meta and different demographics used social media apps for different purposes. While Facebook still had the maximum users, Instagram was on its way to become the most popular app among the millennials. A lip sync video app called Musical.ly, which was renamed to TikTok in 2018 was getting popular with GenZ as well as the Vine and Dubsmash veterans. Twitter catered to celebrities, Reddit had quite a fixed fan base who preferred text over visuals and the lonely Google Plus had quietly shut down shop. Snapchat was popular with its once-unique stories and disappearing messages, features which Instagram had openly copied in 2016 in an effort to attract users away from Snapchat. In October 2019, Instagram announced the launch of Threads, a camera-first messaging app that helps you stay connected with close friends. And guess what the internet called it then? A Snapchat Killer. Instagram Threads was an attempt to be a direct competitor to Snapchat which opens into the camera. If things went well, we would have possibly seen an Instagram counterpart of Facebook Messenger with users being forced to download a messaging app instead of using Instagram Direct for messaging. Wouldn’t have worked well for some though, downloading a separate app to do the creepy DM slide would be overkill. However, Instagram’s “Snapchat Killer” didn’t live up to its hype and it was shut down in late 2021 with most of its most loved features available in the main app itself.

With the 2023 relaunch of Instagram Threads, Meta has now redirected its crosshairs to Twitter which is pretty much in line with its social media world domination strategy over the years. In ever-ongoing Antitrust investigations against Meta, Mark has been accused of deploying the copy-acquire-kill strategy to wipe out competition. In a nutshell, it refers to killing competitors by either copying what they are doing or acquiring them to gain exclusive access to the entire product. While this raises ethical questions, the strategy is highly influenced by the Innovator’s Dilemma, a book published by Harvard professor and businessman, Clayton Christensen in 1997. It explains how innovations operate on an S curve, starting with a minimal value product, providing exponential value with each subsequent iteration and at some point, plateauing to sustaining technology with minimal value adds with each iteration. While the focus of the market leader is to retain its large user base at the end of the S curve, a new player enters the market targeting a separate user base with more desire to innovate and create disruptive technology. By the time the market leader’s user base gets interested in the new player, it is too late to react or keep up since the new player is now in the middle of the S curve. In Mark’s own words - “If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. Embracing change isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. The internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.”

Does this strategy work? It’s a hit and a miss – sometimes counterintuitive to our traditional hunches on product positioning. The most well-known acquisitions would be Instagram in 2012 ($1bn) and WhatsApp in 2014 ($19bn). In 2013, he tried to buy Snapchat for a reported $3bn but got turned down. So it launched Stories in Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. Does it dilute the product positioning? Yes. Did it increase views and user engagement in all these platforms? Yes. What else can we copy from Snapchat now that we shot down 2019 Threads? Disappearing messages – let’s launch Vanish Mode on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram Direct. And it’s not only Snapchat. Facebook launched Marketplace to buy and sell items locally, which was a “Craiglist killer”. It launched a Tinder substitute, Facebook Dating which is barely used. In 2018, it launched a Tiktok killer ripoff Lasso which was shut down in 2020 to make way for an inhouse feature on Instagram called Reels. Reels proved to be a huge hit, more so in countries like India where Tiktok was banned by the national Government. With the short video format being a hit, Facebook Newsfeed was revamped to prioritize Facebook Reels. On the other hand, it shut down experimental products like Hobibi (Pinterest rip-off), Neighborhoods (NextDoor rip-off), Super (Cameo rip-off) and Bulletin (Substack rip-off). It continued copying other popular apps with Messenger Rooms (sounds like Zoom), Audio Rooms (isn’t that Clubhouse?) and now Threads (no one remembers the previous Threads anyway).

In these apps, we have seen a pattern. Stories and Reels have been extremely popular when launched as features in existing apps with an already established massive user base. However, users have not been willing to download separate standalone clones like Lasso and Threads which provided the same functions. Will the new Instagram Threads break this trend? Is the timing just right with users looking for a decent alternative? Will it evolve into a tab on Instagram like Reels, stand on its own as a separate app or have a quiet death like its previous namesake? We’ll wait and watch. But as we do, I want to leave you with a parting thought – is user engagement a good enough metric to define success? As Meta strives for massive growth by trying all modes to keep users glued to their screens (and their ads), is there scope for a new player to come in and bring back the intimacy missing in today’s bloated feeds of random short videos?

Nokia – the new Ship of Theseus?

With around a million new Nokia 6 handsets getting sold in a minute after they got launched in China, we wonder – is the Finnish giant back? The smartphone company which had once engaged the world with its Symbian platform finally joined the Android bandwagon for good after years of running around like a headless chicken. But was it really the same old smartphone company? Since HMD Global bought exclusive rights to sell under the “Nokia” brand name, the brand Nokia which has exchanged a few hands over the past years is now set to be revived. However, this brings us to a few fundamental questions – what made Nokia Nokia? What constitutes a brand? Is the brand name enough for brand loyalists to buy irrespective of the company producing it? Or is it just an initial trigger which is later sustained by what the brand stands for?

Let’s go back to the 1860s to when the company was founded by a mining engineer near a small town called Nokia in Finland. For those of you who don’t know, Nokia started off as a wood pulp mill. It later added electricity generation to its business in the 1900s. The Nokia Corporation we know was founded in 1967 after a series of mergers and acquisitions and this was when the company ventured into electronics and telecommunication. Nokia entered the mobile phone market in the 2000s and was quick to revolutionise the industry with its Symbian OS series. However, with the advent of touch-based iPhones and the Android OS, it suddenly fizzled out unable to keep in touch with the new market. Microsoft buying the Nokia’s mobile division in the 2010s marked the demise of Symbian giving birth to a new generation of Windows Lumia phones which still couldn’t make a significant mark in the Android and iOS dominated market. Finally, in 2016, Microsoft sold off its feature phone assets to a subsidiary of Taiwanese firm Foxconn Technology and newly-established firm HMD Global for $350 million, bringing back “Nokia” phones to the market.

So, who is making the Nokia phones now? HMD owns the patent licenses and design rights. FIH mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn owns the rest of the business, including the factories. The brands, software and services, customer contracts and supply agreements are all under new management. Around 4,500 employees were given the opportunity to join either of the two companies. 

This highly successful flash sale of over a million Nokia 6 phones can be a very interesting topic of discussion for any marketing enthusiast. The initial high demand is due to heavy nostalgia of brand loyalists expecting the same quality and service that the Nokia brand offered. The responsibility of making this a sustainable model largely lies on the marketing team on finding out what exactly the brand stood for in the minds of customers and also, what the customers want now. For example, a Nokia android touch-screen smartphone will not be able to provide the same battery life with the same hardware nor be as robust as it was with the old feature phones. However, they have to be on the top of the game with these and hardware quality as that's what the 1 million people buying it under a minute expect. Will they live up to these expectations? Only time will tell. As for now, the ship of Nokia has been dismantled and remade under HMD Global and FIH mobile. The name “Nokia” still resonates with the people and the ship is set to sail.

Pokemon Go - the future of Digital Marketing

I recently returned from a 3 week stay at Pittsburgh, home to many student campuses thanks to the 2 big universities – University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Apart from the beautiful architecture, rivers and natural scenery, what stayed with me was this new worldwide phenomenon called Pokemon Go.

Imagine walking on the streets one evening just to notice a bunch of young people on lawns and sidewalks flicking their fingers on their smartphones and moving unsteadily in patterns people usually opt for when drunk. 

I later came to know they were trying to catch Pokemons. For those who still don’t know what the game is all about (shame on you!), it is a location-based augmented reality mobile game which mainly uses your smartphone camera and GPS. You see virtual creatures (called Pokemon) in the real world through the camera screen according to your GPS co-ordinates. You can capture, battle and train these Pokemon by visiting assigned buildings as well. What struck me was how a simple game had achieved a new level of consumer engagement in such a short period of time. With the latest hoopla about the advent of VR changing the ad industry, I believe that AR has enormous potential of revolutionising digital marketing in the coming times – Pokemon Go just being a starting example of that.

Here are 5 major themes that will define the shift of digital marketing in the coming future (I will take the liberty of incorporating all of them in Pokemon Go only to justify the title of this blog) -

1. From Intrusive to Interactive Ads

Instead of annoying irrelevant pop-ups on mobile apps, the focus in on increasing user interaction by providing contextual ads which actually pique the user’s interest and require user interaction – take for example, a Getorade refuelling station in Pokemon Go.

2. From Traditional and VR to AR

AR, unlike VR, doesn’t detach the user from the real world. It connects both – the physical and the virtual world by providing engaging content. This helps the user get immersed in it, while staying in touch with the physical world – again, Pokemon Go.

3. From Standardised to Personalised content

You may have read this one before, but here is an example anyway – Imagine travelling on a highway and seeing ads on billboards tailored only to your interests and hobbies, the person behind you sees a completely different set of ads on the same billboard. Personalised content can increase brand retention drastically. Imagine a sports fan like me walking into a Nike store just because my Pokemon Go app suggested that those co-ordinates will help me buy armour for my Pokemon.

4. From SMS to location targeting

Ads will change according to your location – if you’re in front of a Nike store, you will receive messages from Adidas and Puma informing you of their 50% off sales and of course, access to Pokemon training facilities while you shop.

5. Gaming, crowdsourcing and other engagement marketing

With all kinds of such games and relevant engaging content these days, advertising is getting more integrated into people’s lives than be just something you see, skip and then maybe consider later. Crowdsourcing is already a rage and can be leveraged to a great extent with the mainstream advent of technologies like AR into smartphone games. People can start contributing content to the game – which can actually be considered a huge advertisement for Pokemon, the gaming company and any merchandise related to Pokemon. 

What Freedom means to me

“Be water, my friend!” - Bruce Lee

Let’s start with a simple experiment. Take a glass of water. Pour it on the floor. See the water spread. Enjoy the beauty of it. If it doesn’t annoy the people around you, do it again. If it does annoy them, don’t worry, still do it. Every time, the water spreads in a different pattern in different directions. That’s the beauty of nature - the abstraction. And that is what freedom means to me - living life without any boundaries. Stretching one’s water in every direction – more in the direction one wants to go, less in the direction one doesn’t want to go. The water on the floor stops spreading after sometime. That’s when it has reached its maximum point. Similarly, the human brain should be allowed to expand to its maximum potential. Not confined by pouring the water into a well-defined container. That’s when the water is tame, not wild and carefree as on the floor – much to the happiness of the people around you.


Freedom is not being judged in whatever you do and not judging others, whatever they do. A new-born child is free – the mind is pure and sees the world as it is. Opinions, labels and so-called facts are planted into the mind of the child mostly by the people around and also by personal experiences. This is the main cause of inter-racial/religious hatred. Fixed notions and stereotypes develop. People are not ready to accept new things which threaten the basic foundation of certain fixed opinions they have which they have considered to be truths. I, on a personal level, don’t believe in having fixed opinions. If someone tells me that the earth doesn’t revolve around the Sun, I will listen to him/her and say yes, there is a chance although majority of well-researched documents say otherwise. Maybe we are the ones missing something. As Gustave Flaubert says – “There is no truth. There is only perception.” Freedom is to live with an open mind to all perceptions, and at the same time, to be responsible enough to not encroach upon someone else’s freedom.

Freedom, to me, does not fit into categories like regional or national – it goes much beyond that. When the universe and the conscience is one, our world is free from the shackles of states, regions, nations and continents, then we can consider ourselves truly free. When mankind and animal kingdom, life and non-life attain a level of equality, that utopian state is what freedom means to me.

Freedom is the right to tweak Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s quote a bit and say-

“Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father conscience, let my country universe awake.”