A Return to Soap Operas?

We are seeing a welcome shift in the marketing world - a move away from trying to capture customers by shouting at them with ads and commercials, and a move toward gaining fans by creating simply excellent content. Certainly we are still inundated with traditional "interruption marketing" (to borrow the term from Seth Godin) in magazines and newspapers, on tv and billboards and the Internet. But more and more marketers are letting great content speak for itself. They are doing and creating remarkable things that get people talking. (To learn more, read Seth Godin's Purple Cow, if you haven't already.)

I think the rise of smartphone apps and customer-created media (a la YouTube) has aided this trend toward remarkable content. Marketers are communicating via things that can be enjoyed as entertainment even without a brand message.

There is Gillete's uArt iPhone app that lets you add facial hair to a photo of yourself, then shave it into designs of your choice. There is the microsite for Coke Zero, which is really a video game in disguise. And how many company-created YouTube video phenomena do we see now? Like the Frosty Posse from Wendy's.

I see this trend, and I like it. This model inspires us to deeper levels of creativity. It makes me wonder whether we will soon see a huge reinvention of traditional advertising, such that we no longer see magazine ads and billboards and tv commercials as we have them today. Instead, will we see pure content - art, music, videos, games, short stories, poetry, etc. - "sponsored" by companies? For example, instead of tv commercials between our programmed viewing, will we see fun, 60-second short films with a simple, one-line message at the end: "brought to you by [insert brand name here]"?

It would be as if advertising (at least tv and radio) were coming full-circle, returning to the soap opera model. Soap operas got their name because a consumer products company (i.e. Procter & Gamble, who may have been the first?) would sponsor the radio or tv show. They would promote their cleaning products (i.e. Ivory soap); hence the name. If we see more pure content coming from marketers, it will be like a return to our roots.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see where advertising heads in the future. With the rise of the Internet and other "new" media, there has been talk of whether traditional advertising is on its way out. I can still see television, print, and radio ads as having a place alongside (instead of being replaced by) interactive, social media, viral marketing, etc. But these traditional advertising media may look very different in just 5-10 years than they do now.