Trends How many of those #nofilter marketing pics really are #nofilter?

For every deep, meaningful data set we cover, there’s at least one that’s fun but maybe not quite as applicable. This is one of those. The Instagram hashtag #nofilter is used to brag about a photo that was so amazing it didn’t need to be enhanced. But the filter a photo uses isn’t secret, it’s included in the data behind the scenes. So, how many of these photos aren’t telling the truth? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at 70,000 hotel and resort Instagram photos shared during the last year. Of that group, 475 contained the hashtag #nofilter. For context, we also analyzed the last 475 uses of the #nofilter hashtag shared by normal users. We then pulled each photo’s meta data to find which filter, if any, had been applied.

From our sample, about 1.5% of hotel and resort Instagram photos that claimed #nofilter actually applied a filter to the image they shared (about 1 in 68). In terms of random Instagram users, a whopping 13.7% who claimed #nofilter had indeed used a filter (about 1 in 7).

What This Means
Marketing honesty is a daunting subject but it’s something we all consider. Whether it’s truly free wi-fi or if you are just 30 minutes from a major airport, toeing the line between making our destinations sound good and making them sound too good is nothing new.

So while this insight doesn’t completely pull back the curtain, it does suggest that in one regard – claiming we haven’t enhanced a photo – brands and marketers are surprisingly honest…at least relative to the general population.

Next Week, Another Insight
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