Return of the Soaps?

In the last few years, one of the side effects of media fragmentation (and a host of other social and demographic trends) has been the decline of TV soap operas. Several have disappeared – Guiding Light, which started on radio in 1937, was cancelled last year, and it was announced recently that As the World Turns will be discontinued soon.

The soaps got their start as advertising vehicles for companies marketing laundry, dishwashing and related products, thus the genre’s name. Now, just as they shuffle off to wherever old TV shows go to spend their sunset years, it looks like they may be replaced by another form of sponsor-created programming – this time with a trade promo twist.

The world's biggest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores, and the world's biggest consumer-products maker, Procter & Gamble, are jointly creating a made-for-TV movie, in an effort to promote "family-friendly" alternatives to what they say is increasingly risqué TV fare. The two advertising heavyweights have teamed up on the two-hour "Secrets of the Mountain," to be broadcast in April on NBC. The movie, which focuses on a single mother who brings her family to a mountainside cabin, highlights values—such as generosity, honesty and togetherness—that Wal-Mart and P&G executives say are in short supply on television. Ads for both companies will run during commercial breaks, and the film will include product placements for both, their executives say. P&G is spending more than $4.5 million to produce the film, says a person familiar with the matter. It also paid for airtime for the broadcast. Wal-Mart paid some of the costs, including a fee to P&G for the right to be "presenting sponsor.

BusinessWeek said that the movie “features a single mother and her three children who use P&G’s Duracell batteries for flashlights and feed their dog the company’s Iams pet food ... The family eats breakfast cereal from Wal- Mart’s Great Value private-label brand …”

We salute Wal-Mart and P&G and wish them well in their efforts to create family-friendly TV programming. Both companies say they plan additional programming, though it’s not clear whether there will be further production partnerships.

From our perspective, the interesting thing here is that the old idea of advertiser-produced programming has been given the new twist of a supplier and retailer joining together to do the production jointly – that is something that (as far as I know) has never happened before. It adds interest that it is one of the original ‘soap companies’ that pioneered the idea in the earliest days of radio that is also one of the partners in this latest iteration.

Here at TPMA, we’ve been debating whether Wal-Mart and P&G will be sufficiently successful that this will lead to future similar efforts by other major retailers and suppliers, so we’ll make that our exit question: Will it become common for retailers and suppliers to jointly produce programming as advertising vehicles, just as Wal-Mart and P&G are doing?