In the midst of all of your social media scrolling, you’re probably giving out thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of likes to posts on your feed. In our fast paced, impatient world of social media, advertising can disappear in the blink of an eye. Today, quite opposite from its beginnings, advertising is not about persuading your consumer or even about getting noticed, it’s about staying noticed.

Let’s take a brief look at the history of advertising.

50 years ago: Do you want guaranteed success?

Step 1: Create a clear brand

Step 2: Frequently get your brand into television, print, and radio

Step 3: Dominate your category

Today: Do you want guaranteed success?

Step 1: Create a unique brand that stands out from competition. It must captivate audiences, break the norms of creative advertising, be disruptive, offer higher-end emotional benefits, be relevant to the time period yet timeless, be witty but not offensive, be original and classic, make sure you give back to the community, have celebrity recognition and endorsements. Make sure it’s hip enough for millennials, but not too hip because hipsters don’t like that, and make sure your grandma would want to buy whatever you’re selling too.

Step 2: Don’t use a billboard, CREATE a billboard. Be everywhere on social media. Get all the likes. Come up with some other way than the usual platforms to get some attention. If you must use radio or TV or print it better be fantastic visually and emotionally.

Step 3: Get noticed…hopefully.

Step 4: Competition comes in.

Step 5: Be mentioned somewhere as a player in your category.

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Waiting for Step 6: Dominate your category? This step doesn’t likely exist.

We’re not saying success is impossible, many brands are incredibly successful, but it is extremely rare to be dominant. So what should advertisers do?

 Stay noticed. Again and again.

“If we can get people to notice what our brands are doing and talk to each other or share what our brands are doing-and we can do that numerous times every year-then our brands win.”

Today, advertising is no longer a means of persuasion. It’s a way to stay in the user’s memory all day.

For example, the McDonald’s interactive snapchat filter that gives you a bell-pepper mustache while you catch chicken nuggets falling from the top of the screen doesn’t directly say: “Come to our store and buy our product.” But, later in the day when you’re getting hungry, your memory will remember McDonald’s and soon you’ll be munching on chicken nuggets, fries, and a Coke.

It’s a new relationship between innovation and media. And we don’t see them breaking up anytime soon.