On Monday, October 26, Instagram handed a select group of US creators the ability to post videos up to 90 minutes long.
Ninety minutes. That's the runtime of a feature film. On the same app where most brand Reels lose their audience somewhere between the logo and the second word of the voiceover.
The format is called Features, and Instagram's own pitch is that it supports "expanded storytelling in the app." Podcasts, vlogs, interviews. It arrives alongside two siblings: Clips as Reels, which lets creators link up to eight short clips back to a longer video, and Series, which tags Reels into an episodic run. Instagram has been testing Features in Brazil and says it will expand the US test in the coming months.
Somewhere a brand team is already drafting a 90-minute "Inside Our Company" documentary.
Please don't.
Let's remember how this went last time. Instagram launched IGTV, a whole separate app for long-form video, in 2018. It shut it down in 2022. Four years and a lot of vertical webinars nobody finished. Social Media Today's coverage of the Features test raises that history as a warning sign, and it also points out the money problem: VidIQ estimates YouTube pays roughly $1 to $10 per thousand long-form views, while an Instagram view is worth effectively nothing without a brand deal attached. Creators go where the checks clear.
So this isn't a gold rush. It's a dare.
And here's what makes the dare interesting. While Instagram was getting ready to offer 90 minutes, Banana Republic was proving that you don't need them.
On October 14, the brand debuted "The Agency" on TikTok, a five-part comedy series about a fictional, failing New York travel agency called Travel & Tours. The staff are a gallery of beautifully specific disasters: Howard, the insecure senior manager; Barry, the overconfident cruise expert; Roland, the self-described Francophile who hasn't left the US since 1998; Dean, the overly cautious head of the adventure desk. Jack Innanen plays every one of them. A corporate consultant named Dana shows up to modernize the place. Episode one is called "The Fax."
Episode one had about 10 million views by the time Marketing Dive wrote it up on October 22. Episode two, released that same week, had already passed 3 million.
Think about what Banana Republic did not do. It did not make a lookbook with a soundtrack. It did not hire a celebrity to walk slowly through a desert in linen. It made a sitcom, and let the clothes do the job wardrobe does in any good show: tell you who these people are. Marketing Dive notes the series runs weekly across the brand's owned channels with behind-the-scenes content, made by an in-house unit called Banana Republic Productions. CMO Meena Anvary described it as fashion and entertainment with "a nostalgic sense of wit and irreverence."
That's the whole game, compressed into one quote. Wit. Irreverence. A world you'd want to visit again next Tuesday.
It's also not a one-off. Gap Inc., Banana Republic's parent, hired a former Paramount executive, Pam Kaufman, as its first chief entertainment officer earlier this year. When a clothing company hires a TV person to sit at the leadership table, it's telling you what it thinks the job of marketing has become. Programming. Not posting.
Put the two stories next to each other and the lesson is almost rude in its simplicity. Instagram is offering runtime. Banana Republic proved that what earns attention is premise. A recurring cast, a world with rules, a reason to come back. "The Agency" episodes are short. The show is long. Length lives in the series, not in the clip.
Which means the brands celebrating 90 minutes are asking the wrong question. The question was never "how long can we go?" It was "what would make someone want episode two?"
Most brands can't answer that, and the reason is the same reason their Reels die at second three. They don't have a point of view. They have a product, a list of features and a tone-of-voice document that says "approachable yet premium." You can't build a show on that. You can barely build a decent caption, and the feed knows it.
Now the turn, because this is where it gets uncomfortable for those of us who make content for a living.
For years the industry has hidden behind format. Reels were too short to tell a real story. TikTok rewarded dance trends, not brands. Stories disappeared. Every limitation was a perfect excuse for mediocre work, because the platform was the constraint. Instagram just removed the constraint. If you get 90 minutes and still can't hold anyone, there's nobody left to blame. Not the algorithm. Not the format. Just the damn work.
Runtime is an X-ray. It shows what was already there.
A brand with something to say will look great in long form. A brand with nothing to say will look exactly as empty as it is, just for longer. That's the dare.
So what do you do if you run a hotel bar in West Hollywood, a boxing gym in Culver City or a salon in Los Feliz? You're not Gap. You don't have a chief entertainment officer. You have a space, some regulars and staff who are, if you've hired well, funnier than your marketing.
That's a show.
Not a 90-minute show. Maybe six episodes, one location, one host. The bartender who rates customers' drink orders. The coach who coaches a different neighborhood character every week. The stylist who narrates a cut like it's a nature documentary. The location gives you production value for free. The host gives you a face people come back for. And thanks to Clips as Reels, each longer episode can be cut into short pieces that link back, so the feed becomes a trailer for the series instead of a pile of unrelated posts.
The rules for making it work are the rules of television, not of social media. Give the audience a recurring person. Give them a premise they can explain to a friend in one sentence. Give every episode a tiny ending that makes the next one feel inevitable. And write it like a comedy writer, not a copywriter, because the internet can tell the difference in about a second.
That's exactly how we approach owned programming for clients: start with the room and the people already in it, find the premise hiding in plain sight, then shoot it so every piece works alone and in sequence. The shoot is the easy part. The premise is where the work is.
There's one more thing worth saying, and it's the part the format announcements leave out. A series demands commitment. Episode one is a promise that episode two is coming, and the fastest way to burn an audience is to start a show and quietly abandon it after three weeks because "engagement was soft." Banana Republic committed to five episodes, weekly, with behind-the-scenes content around it. That's a plan for a season, not a test post. If you're not ready to commit to six weeks of a show, don't start one. Make one great piece instead.
Instagram's new format will probably go one of two ways. Creators will figure out how to use it, or it'll go the way of IGTV, a long, expensive footnote. Either way, the lesson from this week won't change. The feed doesn't reward length. It doesn't reward polish. It rewards a reason to stay.
Ninety minutes is a lot of rope. Most brands will use it to hang their own reach.
Be the one with something to say. Then, and only then, take the extra time.
