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Picture by Esther Vargas under Creative Commons License |
Revised in October 2026.
You may have noticed a gradual trend toward brevity among some of the most popular online platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and, more recently, Snapchat, all characterized by an increasingly casual, brief, and sometimes fleeting style of communication.
Brands are being challenged to promote their products through applications where content may disappear within seconds. It is not an easy task for advertisers to come up with a message that is striking, interesting, and “sticky” enough to capture attention amid a waterfall of tweets, status updates, photographs, and conversations that are often fragmented and lacking in continuity.
Snapchat makes the challenge particularly interesting. Its conversations can be spontaneous, random, and short-lived, making it difficult even for automated systems designed to detect keywords to determine which advertisements might be relevant. Yet advertisers are beginning to include these platforms in their campaigns and, in some cases, to discover unexpected benefits.
Instagram, for example, introduced its first paid mobile advertisements in late 2013. Less than a month later, a report released by the company described the experiment as a success. Three of the four sponsors included in the report said they had achieved the brand perception they were seeking while reaching audiences of between seven and nine million users without flooding Instagram with advertising. In just nine days, Levi’s reached nearly seven million users in the United States, while Ben & Jerry’s achieved similar results, reaching close to ten million people during a campaign of roughly the same duration.
Although the information exchanged on these platforms is highly volatile, fleeting, and often chaotic, the possibilities for advertisers are considerable. Imagine the kind of information available through social media: a teenager may announce a new relationship, post photographs from a vacation, mention a nightclub they found unbearably boring, or casually discuss a product they like or dislike. Individually, these details may seem trivial. Together, they begin to reveal interests, preferences, habits, and intentions.
For advertisers trying to define the profile of their consumers, that information can be extraordinarily valuable.
The content may be ephemeral. Its value to advertisers may not be.
