Snapchat has been a huge fad of late. It’s a service where you send your friends images or videos much like a typical messaging service except that after a brief moment (mere seconds) the piece of media deletes itself, leaving no trace of its existence. A recent piece on AdAge talks of the value of having something so fleeting. It talks about the strength and value of ads and how that has been diminished so much as people follow such easy trends. The aim of marketing nowadays hasn’t necessarily been about innovation nor creating something of true value but to reach a certain critical mass of virality, utilizing the most effective tools of the moment to do so.

Examine the idea of having media shared on the internet to be temporary and fleeting like a Snapchat message. What if ads viewed by a person were only viewable or shareable once and after that it dissipates into the void. The amount of respect and value that marketers would have to inject into an ad would be tremendous. As what the article talks about, think about those notes you used to pass around when you were a kid. Those little scraps of paper containing nothing in particular that sometimes still remains as ingrained in your head as that first Coke jingle you heard on the radio. What if an ad for a resonated so strongly and was so well done that that happened. What would be the nature of marketing and the nature of digital marketing then. I don’t know about you but it’s one thought I wouldn’t mind exploring a little bit further.