• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, January 16, 2015

TV-style advertising that disappears? Sounds like, well, TV advertising.

Your friendly TV media buyer always thinks along those lines. So you might see the same financial TV commercial on CNBC from one day to another... and another. TV/video advertising is still all about reach and frequency – or, as our dearly departed friend Erwin Ephron would say, “recency.”

This is an area the social media messaging app SnapChat seemingly wants to play in, with messages that disappear soon after their respective release.  SnapChat wants to charge up to $750,000 a day to some marketers -- all with the hope of grabbing perhaps some 1 million unique viewers in one day. This would be much more than what YouTube charges for its top advertising placement -- but less than Apple’s iAd $1 million a day media buy.

Some would say this is different: We are talking about those hard to reach consumers, the Millennials and Gen-Xers. You need to start somewhere -- those areas where the “light” TV viewers reside. So you go after traditional TV marketers’ money for this stuff? Maybe.

But we won’t still have much in the way of who is seeing those disappearing advertising campaigns -- men, women, rich or poor? At least in TV we may have some idea.

SnapChat takes great pains to let its users know that conversations disappear soon after there are sent -- leaving no trace.  TV advertising messages already do the same thing -- though there are hundreds of ways of reviving them digitally, should your brain desire to refresh some corporate “messaging.”

Users sometimes want no trace that their content has been around; marketers may have other ideas.