Hasta La Creative!

Yesterday we talked about why Snapchat in particular should never carry ads. Today let’s look at what would happen if all media functioned like Snapchat, disappearing a few seconds after someone viewed it. It’s an important question for marketers. With Snapchat, messages are privately sent to select recipients, and then they vanish.

The press gets hung up on sharing horror stories about teens using Snapchat for sexting, but doesn’t devote enough attention to how and why most of the app’s tens of millions of users engage with it. Snapchat should be disconcerting for marketers because it’s a place where hundreds of millions of posts are shared daily, but they’re invisible. They can’t be tracked, measured and analyzed. There’s no buzz monitoring report for what’s trending in Snapchat, and if Snapchat offered such a service, its audience would flee en masse.

The way most people think about social media is that anything worth sharing is worth saving. Facebook added a corollary: Anything worth sharing is worth sharing publicly. Twitter added its own corollary: Anything shared publicly is worthy of saving for posterity. How else can one explain that Americans’ public tweets are saved in the Library of Congress?

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