The New Soap Operas

So I was having a conversation last week with one of my colleagues at Sapient, Rob Gonda, about the future of advertising. (Yes, we actually do sit around and talk about advertising, believe it or not). Most of the conversation was about more 'traditional' advertising, TV, radio, newspaper. We were discussing the ways we have recently seen some advertisers rise above the noise and the massive changes that have occured in those media. We discussed how TV advertising, in particular, would have to seriously change, with the prevalence of Tivo and DVRs, and the fact that there will sometime soon not even be a TV schedule or season. Nothing new for anyone who has even a little knowledge of what is going on in the industry.

One of the prognostications that we discussed was the probability (in my mind, at least) that advertisers would have to go back to actually creating compelling content where their products were interweaved into the plot. Just like the original Soap Operas, that (as you hopefully know) got their name from the fact that they were hour-long advertisements for detergents. I figured that they would come back in a somewhat different form, and be nothing like the massive amount of horrible product placement going on, which attempts to put the product into an already existing concept and plot. One of the worst examples of product placement that I've seen was during an episode of The Office. It was so bad that it turned me off the show (which had been one of my favorites to that point) for pretty much the rest of that season.

So I was flipping through the channels in the hotel I'm in tonight, and ended up on TNT watching a rerun. And, lo and behold, on came exactly the type of thing I was talking about. TNT has created a "micro-series" called Lucky Chance, which consists of 20 2-minute episodes, all featuring the Dodge Challenger. The 'minisodes' are played during commercial breaks on TNT shows such as Bones and Law and Order. And they are actually pretty good. And there's also a bit of a Web component, with a sweepstakes, and online game. I would have liked to have seen a little bit more of a web component, with maybe more of an ARG, which the format created almost begs for. But one step at a time.