Here’s the first Instagram ad — thanks, Michael Kors

Instagram released its first advertisement today, and it’s a fairly pretty picture of a Michael Kors watch.

And that’s it.

The image is posted to Michael Kors’ own Instagram page and is then pushed out to anyone on the service and marked as a sponsored ad, whether they follow Kors or not. Now owned by Facebook, Instagram showed off its ads product last week in order to prep its community. Originally, it was believed that Insta-ads weren’t going to show up until next year.

But the thing is, it actually is a less-invasive, albeit not entirely original, form of advertising. That picture is pretty, and those macarons look delightful. I’d like to eat them. I don’t mind this in my stream.

It’s when my stream is filled with these things, and movie posters, and lots of other content that I’ll get pissed, but we know Instagram will regulate — right?

Tumblr uses this approach and only permits four advertisements into a stream per day. That’s not bad if the photos are interesting. It’ll be even better when Instagram gets a little of that Facebook magic and starts to tell serve pictures based on what we’re interested in.

(Hint to Facebook: You won’t go wrong with food and hedgehogs photographed with props when serving ads to this gal).