Soft Soap

Quick, what’s the longest story ever told?

If you answered daytime drama “The Guiding Light,” then Procter & Gamble has done its job. The company originally sponsored the soap opera in 1937 as a radio drama setting for its soap-powder commercials, and it’s been running weekdays on TV since 1952, broadcasting more than 15,000 episodes.

Now P&G has just wrapped up another detergent-related creative project with a digital twist: “Crescent Heights”, a series of 10 weekly episodes designed for play over mobile phone screens and the Internet. The series revolved around four 20-something residents of an apartment complex trying to make it in L.A., wearing bright fashions and pausing every so often to do a load of laundry with the red plastic bottle of P&G’s Tide detergent somewhere in the shot.

The episodes are largely self-contained, but the series does have a possible story arc in a budding romance between two of the leads. (“Crescent Heights” was still two episodes from the end of its first run at press time, so no spoilers will be revealed.)

For all the company’s sponsorship, scripts for the eight- to 10-minute episodes emphasized engagement and entertainment over product placement. That soft sell is intentional, says Tide assistant brand manager Rex Jackson.

“The biggest challenge we faced in developing ‘Crescent Heights’ was striking the right balance between keeping it entertaining and introducing branding,” he says. “Laundry hasn’t always been the most interesting category to talk about, so we needed to find a way to weave Tide into the story line naturally.”

Rather than talking about fabric care or stubborn stains, “Crescent Heights” characters were more apt to talk about the right outfit for a first day on the job or to flirt while doing a late-night wash. In at least two of the episodes, there’s no sign of a Tide placement at all — just the characters interacting. Jackson adds that some of the episodes were judged to have too much branding at first review, so the crew went back and either edited or re-shot scenes to take the product out.

“It’s easy to go too heavy on the brand side, but people don’t want to watch a five-minute commercial once a week for 10 weeks,” Jackson says. Even when the red bottle didn’t appear, the episodes still took place in a world of bright colors and well-tended wardrobes, so that fabric care was part of the subtext.

Tide’s primary strategic goal with the series was to create content that would reach Gen Y where many of them live — namely, over their cell phones. “Crescent Heights” is available as a mobile series on the GoTV Networks mobile channel and at the GoTV Web site.

Webside viewers got other engaging content around each episode, including polls about what the characters should do next, links to their Facebook and MySpace pages, additional video and interactive games that revolved around fashion and clothes. Viewers could also e-mail an episode to friends, download it to their blog or personal Web page, and sign up for alerts notifying them when the next episode was posted to the microsite.

“We wanted to give Web viewers a chance to bond more with the characters, and also to increase the likelihood that they would come back the next week to watch the next episode,” Jackson says.

Tide isn’t talking much about measurable results until the series has ended and all the stats are in, but Jackson says the company has been monitoring various metrics both online and offline.

“We’re looking at a number of different measurements, everything from how many people viewed the program on their phones or at Tide.com to whether it increased the amount of time they spent on the site,” he says. “We’re also applying some of the traditional metrics that we have for television commercials, so we’re interested in whether the people who watch ‘Crescent Heights’ are also interested in purchasing Tide.”