Act Fast! Company Offers the World’s Quickest Coupon

How’s this for a limited-time offer? A milk drink brand is believed to be the first to offer a coupon that’s available for exactly one second. Blink and you’ll miss it – literally.

The coupon comes courtesy of Oak, the Australian maker of flavored milk products. So you won’t be able to take advantage of it, if you’re not Down Under. But if the lightning-quick coupon experiment catches on, you may someday see one-second coupons for a product sold near you.

Oak began making the coupon available last month on Snapchat, the social app that’s based upon the concept of sending images, or “snaps”, that can only be viewed for anywhere from one to ten seconds before they disappear.

Why would you want to do that, you might wonder? Go ask a teenager. The moms may have taken over Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram these days, but Snapchat still has the youngest demographic of any of the major social networks, with nearly half of its user base under the age of 25.

And that’s precisely the market that Oak wanted to reach.

“Oak is incredibly popular among the Snapchat generation, so we want to do something special for the launch of its Snapchat account,” said creative director Morten Halvorsen of the company’s ad agency, “The Monkeys”.

“Screenshot this to get a free Oak,” read the snap that first went out a few weeks ago. Followers were then able to test their reflexes, by trying to capture the coupon before it vanished one second later. If they weren’t fast enough, they got a followup Snap suggesting that they drink more Oak, in order to get the energy they need to capture the coupon next time.

“Not only does it attract people to follow Oak on Snapchat, but it also dramatizes the product benefit by simply using the application’s infamous functionality,” Halvorsen said.

The campaign launched on March 18th, and was scheduled to run for a month, or until 500 coupons were snapped up, whichever came first. As it turns out, Oak’s followers were quicker than the company anticipated – by last week, after just 12 days, all of the coupons had been claimed.

That would seem to be enough to consider the campaign a success. And success tends to breed imitation. So keep your eye out for one-second coupons on our shores. They may appear – and disappear – before you know it.