CINCINNATI — Goodbye, “Guiding Light.” Hello, YouTube.
Procter & Gamble, whose sponsorship and production of daytime TV dramas helped coin the term “soap operas,” has pulled the plug after 77 years. The maker of Tide detergent, Ivory soap and Olay skin care is following its customers online with a big push on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. “The digital media has pretty much exploded,” marketing chief Marc Pritchard said. “. . . It’s become part of the way we do marketing.”
The last P&G-produced soap opera, “As the World Turns,” went off the air in September. The show was the leading daytime soap for decades but had lost two-thirds of its audience at the end. “Guiding Light” was dimmed a year earlier.
Over the years, P&G produced 20 soap operas for radio and TV. But ratings for daytime dramas have been sinking for years, as women, their target audience, increasingly moved into the workplace, switched to talk and reality shows, and spent more time using online media and social-networking sites.
Instead, P&G has begun selling Pampers diapers on Facebook, offering an iPhone application for Always feminine products that allows women to track menstrual cycles and ask experts questions, and using social media to turn a campaign for the venerable Old Spice brand into a pop-culture icon. The “Smell Like a Man, Man” commercials starring hunky former football player Isaiah Mustafa have became a YouTube sensation. The Associated Press
