Content Marketing Today

Rising Tide from P&G: Moving Soap Opera to the Internet

It may be that soap operas represent the earliest form of content marketing. If Procter&Gamble has its way, online soap operas may become the newest form of content marketing.

Way back in the early days of radio, Procter&Gamble invented what we now call ” daytime drama” with something called “Ma Perkins” that ultimately led to the venerable Guiding Light. In the 1920s and thirties, soap companies like Procter&Gamble were sole sponsors of these tear jerkers.

Unlike those awful overnight infomercials, listeners tuned in for daily doses of drama which was leavened by small amounts of time talking about soap. Listeners identified with the poor suffering souls who populated the soaps—but they also bought a lot of soap from Procter&Gamble. That sounds a lot like content marketing to me.

Soap in the Virtual City–P&G pioneers once again

Mike Cassidy in his October 23 Video Insider notes that P.&G. has recently moved online in an effort to take content marketing to an audience that it otherwise risks losing. He notes:

As television consumption among young adults and children drastically declines, advertisers are trying to engage this audience Where They are, which means the Web and eventually mobile. This is a first step by an advertiser to do just that outside of basic video advertising and sponsorships on social networking Web sites.

And so a new soap bubbles forth. It’s called Crescent Heights and features a sweet young thing, Ashley, who moves from cow country in the Midwest to Los Angeles where she embarks on what she hopes will be a glamorous new life. It’s very well done. But, it’s pretty darned tame compared to its television siblings.

Interestingly they do not actually push their brand of detergent, Tide. Of course, you do see big bottles of Tide and dirty laundry in various scenes. But there is no overt sales pitch. P&G gambles young people will actually take time to watch this little drama and be able to relate to it. Unless young consumers keep coming back again and again, this pioneering content marketing effort just won’t work.

But, me, I’m rooting for this online effort to turn the Tide on behalf of content marketing.