Advertisement: new forms of fugacity

Picture by Esther Vargas under
Creative Commons License

You may have noticed the gradual trend to brevity exhibited by the most popular online platforms

such as Facebook, Instagram, and more recently Snapchat, all characterized by a casual, brief, increasingly fleeting and ephemeral style.

Brands are challenged to promote their products through an application in which the content disappears in seconds. Not an easy task for advertisers to come up with a shocking announcement, interesting, "sticky", efficient enough to capture the attention among that waterfall of twitters, status updates, and conversations often disjointed and lacking in consistency. Especially in the case of Sanpchat (currently the 3rd. most popular social application among youth, behind Facebook and Instagram), the randomness of conversation sometimes makes it difficult even for robots aimed to detect the use of keywords, get to determine what kind of notice or advertising is more or less relevant. However, advertisers are including such platforms in their advertising efforts, and even beginning to capitalize on unexpected benefits of their campaigns.

As per Instagram, this application introduced the first paid ads (for mobile version) in last November. Less than a month later, the report released by the company showed the experience as a great success: three out of the four sponsors included in the report revealed having achieved the perception that they were pursuing for their brands, reaching an audience of between 7 and 9 million users without flooding Instagram with their ads. Indeed, in a span of nine days Levi reached nearly 7 million users in the US, while Ben & Jerry achieve similar results, reaching nearly 10 million people in a campaign the same period.

Although, as noted above, the information exchanged on these platforms is highly volatile, fleeting, and most chaotic cases, this type of advertising has virtually endless possibilities. Imagine the kind of information available to applications like Facebook or Snapchat: the average teenager publicize events such as their new relationship, or if they’ve gone on vacation to this, that and such place; if they have visited some disco and found it brutally boring ... This is like a diamond in the rough for the advertiser trying to define the profile of its consumers. And to skillful miners, half a nugget is gold...