• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, September 16, 2015

Ian Chee, Chief Strategy Officer at digital agency MRY, has a funny story about the sales teams for Instagram and Facebook coming in for meetings, independently of each other.

The joke, as Chee told attendees of MediaPost’s Engage: Millennials conference on Wednesday, is that they were basically the same team taking the opportunity to sell different products.

As the teams told Chee, however, it does require very different products and approaches to effectively engage audiences on Instagram and Facebook.

On Facebook, it’s all about prominently featuring products to cut through the clutter, while the opposite is true on Instagram.

For Chee, the differences spoke to the “very different” approaches required to succeed on different platforms, and the problem that poses to marketers trying to achieve efficiencies of scale.

“It’s almost impossible,” said Chee. Still, the goal is to try to balance between efficiency and relevance,” even though, in his experience, relevance usually wins.