Hasta La Creative!

I’ve been feeling a sense of dj vu about Snapchat and I’m not happy about it.

Specifically, I’ve been having flashbacks to circa 2008-2009, when Twitter was becoming a media chattering-class obsession and felt like it was on the verge of going mainstream. At the time, I wrote a couple columns for Ad Age simultaneously declaring my love for my Twitter (as a user) and expressing my fears about its long-term prospects. Because I wasn’t seeing much in the way of a convincing business model from Twitter management; the revenue that Twitter was drawing from marketers often seemed to fall into the experimental bucket plus “look at us embracing the hottest new platforms” us-too-ism.

Back then, there was enough starry-eyed optimism about any and all social media that readers roasted me for daring to question Twitter’s long-term growth, because surely something as awesome as Twitter would be able to somehow make money on such an awesome user base, which was then growing exponentially. One British reader even angrily called me a “muppet” — i.e., an unthinking puppet mouthing the sour sentiments of, I gathered, Luddites and other cranky technophobes.

Continue reading at AdAge.com