The last time marketers faced this particular problem, Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House and radio was the hot new medium. Procter & Gamble's solution — funding dramatic serials to reach housewives between loads of laundry — was so effective that it gave the English language a new compound noun. Now, nearly a century later, a growing number of marketers are arriving at roughly the same conclusion, though they are more likely to call it "entertainment-first strategy" than soap opera.
The roster of brands making deliberate bets on programming over posting includes SharkNinja, Gap, Mattel, LVMH and Arsenal Football Club, according to a report in Digiday. Some are partnering with social publishers; others are hiring creators as creative directors or standing up in-house studios. A handful have gone so far as to co-produce Hollywood films. (Whether any of these will be remembered as fondly as "As the World Turns" remains to be seen.)
What they share, according to the report, is a common diagnosis: traditional advertising is being skipped, blocked or scrolled past with increasing efficiency, while the volume of content competing for whatever attention remains keeps rising. The irony, of course, is that the same performance-marketing tools that made advertising more measurable also made it less memorable. Marketers, in the words of the report, "optimized so hard for the click over the years that they eventually forgot how to make someone feel something."
The data suggests the shift is real, if unevenly distributed. A Sprout Social survey of 2,300 consumers and 1,200 marketers across the United States, Britain and Australia found that episodic series have become marketers' top social priority for the coming year — ahead of artificial intelligence-generated content and long-term influencer partnerships. Consumers, for their part, say what they actually want is human-generated content. The brands most likely to succeed, in other words, are the ones building around a genuine voice rather than a production schedule.
"That is the shift that has happened in the last five years, and it has inherently blurred the lines between advertising and entertainment," said Jennifer Salke, an executive quoted in the report.
Whether the current enthusiasm for entertainment-first marketing will prove more durable than previous cycles of the same idea is, as always, an open question. But P.&G. built a rather large company on the premise that if you want someone's attention, you might have to earn it.
Original story published in Digiday: "Why brands are relearning how to entertain first, advertise second", by Seb Joseph