To engage the housewives of the 1920s and 30s (while their husbands were away at work), there was just one medium in those days – radio. Proctor & Gamble saw the opportunity to communicate with their target audience for the soap brands they sold and started by sponsoring the Friday morning NBC radio show Radio Beauty School in 1927.
Buoyed by the success of that sponsorship, P&G further sponsored many daily radio shows through their many soap brands, like the 1933 daily radio serial called Ma Perkins, sponsored by P&G’s Oxydol laundry Soap.
This eventually led to the phrase ‘soap opera’ and carried on to the products sponsoring daily TV shows too with the advent of television.
The kind of brand intervention in these shows was through the association with the program’s title (‘Oxydol’s Own Ma Perkins’, for instance) and through a more direct pitch by the radio host/announcer who makes a clear mention of the brand that is sponsoring the show people are tuned into.
With TV soap operas, the product communication was direct and intrusive – a break in programming that led to the products ads being aired.
From those days, we have morphed advertising in many, many ways, right up to the internet where things have taken bizarre shapes with brands, content owners, and platforms merging into weird ideas of who is advertising what to whom and the audience not being entirely clear as to what is paid-advertising and that is entertainment.
The next evolution of this messy situation is gradually unfolding now and also uses OTT platforms that have relatively less advertising of the intrusive variety.
Take the example of the 4-episode documentary called ‘The Cost of Winning’ that premiered on HBO and HBO Max in November 2020. Even as there was no overt product selling, the show’s theme, revolving around the young men and coaching staff of the St. Frances Academy Panthers high school football program in Baltimore, Maryland, was tuned to talk about Gillette’s brand theme: ‘The best a man can be’, weaving in sub-themes like mentorship, overcoming adversity, and the power of community! The program was conceived and produced by Gillette’s brand team, Dentsu’s in-house production team The Story Lab, and SMAC Entertainment.
The simple insight here is that people do not want to see ads on TV/digital devices anymore. They watch what interests them and right now long-form content interests a lot of people, mainly on OTT platforms.
Or, consider Uncle Drew, the film that was spawned from an ad for Pepsi Max and one that Pepsi eventually produced as a co-producer, taking the ad to a new, longer form!
Airbnb developed, financed, and produced a documentary film titled, ‘Gay Chorus Deep South’ in 2019 because the film’s theme of inclusivity aligned with the company’s values!
In 2020, Ford launched a mockumentary (a fictional documentary – or a fictional script that is made to look like a serious documentary) in Hulu, featuring a man named John Bronco as the lead (played by Walton Goggins) who is approached by Ford to become the Ford Bronco’s brand ambassador in the 1960s. Ford opened up its archives to the production crew (Imagine Documentaries) that helped make a convincing fake documentary peppered with real cars from the era. But why would a car company produce a mockumentary and place it on a streaming platform like Hulu? To prime the audiences for the return of Ford Bronco newer variants!
John Bronco has a sequel called ‘John Bronco Rides Again’ that dropped on Hulu last week!
The John Bronco series is most definitely advertising, but each episode lasts 30+ minutes and does not interrupt while you are watching something else! It asks you to consciously choose it to watch!
Incidentally, John Bronco is not the only mockumentary around. Ted Lasso, the massively successful Apple TV show, started life as a mockumentary to announce NBC Sports acquiring the rights to air the UK’s Premier League soccer matches in 2013. To acquaint US audiences, they created a series of promos styled featuring a college football coach from Kansas City arriving in London with no knowledge of the Premier League!
Advertising started by interrupting your attention while you did something else and talking about the product or service. Eventually, advertisers learned that even the advertisements need not be mere product/service pitches, but can be entertaining by themselves too. But they still were interrupting your attention – the only difference was that what you wanted to watch and the ads that interrupted it, both were entertaining.
Now, brands are asking you to choose to watch their really long advertisements because they are entertainingly scripted while plugging some product or service either directly or indirectly. This is far beyond product placement inside something you want to watch – what you want to watch, and one that is long-form content, is produced by the brand in its entirety, not merely sponsored by it.
Brands played on the sidelines of content earlier. Now they have infiltrated content like never before. While they did that, they are also infiltrating our attention far beyond merely asking for a few seconds or minutes of it. And when this content drops on OTT platforms, we, the audience, actually pay for such content! Imagine – we pay for ads and consciously choose to watch them! That’s a terrific twist in the world of advertising which has always paid for content so that we can get it free while putting up with ads.
PS: We could add Kota Factory too to this list considering it is produced by Unacademy.
