Proctor & Gamble Turns to Facebook, YouTube After Soap Opera Era

By Chuong Nguyen on 12/09/2010, filed in Home > Web

After 77 years of sponsoring the daytime television genre of soap opera that helped the company with product placement in advertising to women, Proctor & Gamble is quickly turning to social media venues such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to re-align its marking campaigns in the new age of connectivity. The company is exiting the daytime soap business after having produced 20 soap operas for radio and TV had seen ratings sink, and now is exploring cheaper ways than buying TV commercials for popular products such as Old Spice and Olay. More recently, the company began offering Pampers on Facebook, delivering an iPhone app to sell feminine products while helping women track their monthly menstrual cycles and chat with experts, and also used social marketing to turn Old Spice into a new hit. The trend with Internet advertising and marketing is likely to grow as users spend more time shopping both online at home and online on their connected smartphones.

Facebook: Facebook is a Social Networking service launched in 2004. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. At first, only students from Harvard could join the service, but over time more users were allowed to join. Today, Facebook remains the leader in social networking, but most importantly, it is the top online identity provider as the overwhelming majority of Facebook users have registered using their real identities.If you have a Facebook account, you can use Ubergizmo's Social Reader.

YouTube: is a video-sharing website where users can upload videos. It is currently (7/2012) the largest such site, and was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who all worked at PayPal before. While it mainly featured movies from regular folks (and some illegal user uploads) at the beginning, but eventually YouTube grabbed enough market share to attract higher quality content over the years. Now, there is something for everyone, and YouTube continues to push for high-quality content, while keeping the support from amateur video-makers. The company was acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.6B.

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