#137 1933 · Procter & Gamble · Consumer goods / advertisingpiggyback
Instead of buying a better ad break, P&G bought the story itself and gave the genre its name
the problem
A paid advertisement was easy for the audience to simply tune out or ignore between segments of the content they actually wanted
background
Radio advertising in the early 1930s worked the same way print advertising always had: a paid spot inserted around programming the listener actually tuned in for, competing directly against the entertainment for a distracted audience's attention and easy to mentally or physically tune out. Household-product advertisers like Procter & Gamble had no particular reason to expect radio spots to work any better than any other interruption-based format.
P&G had a specific audience it needed to reach reliably and repeatedly: homemakers doing daytime housework, a captive radio audience with routine schedules but no strong pull toward any particular daytime programming, since little of it was made with them specifically in mind.
the move
In 1933 P&G began financing and producing its own serialized daytime radio drama, Ma Perkins, sponsored by its Oxydol soap brand — rather than buying an ad slot around someone else's show, the company became the studio behind the content itself, airing new episodes five days a week that built the kind of habitual, story-driven return audience no interruptive ad spot could generate on its own.
the payoff
Ma Perkins ran for 27 years and 7,065 episodes on NBC and later simultaneously on CBS, reaching Canada and Europe via Radio Luxembourg, with lead actress Virginia Payne never missing a single broadcast; P&G expanded the model into a full slate of soap-company-sponsored serials that became so dominant on daytime radio that the entire dramatic genre was named 'soap opera' after the sponsor category itself.
what came after
P&G was running roughly twenty of these serialized dramas by the 1960s, and the format is widely credited as the origin of storytelling-based, content-driven advertising — the direct historical ancestor of modern branded content, sponsored television and streaming series, and native advertising, all built on the same insight that owning the content an audience returns to voluntarily outperforms interrupting content they didn't choose.
references
- [1]Ma PerkinsWikipedia, 2026en.wikipedia.org
- [2]The History of Procter & Gamble's Soap Opera Involvement: Part OneSoapHub, 2024soaphub.com