It's Back to Soap Opera Style Sponsorship

Call it what you will these days; advertainment, product placement, advergaming. Marketers are returning to the days of old when marketers "owned" television shows. They had a much firmer grasp on the content and a much bigger slice of the sponsorship pie.

Well, what goes around, comes around. We are just calling it something different this time. Pepsi has just announced plans for a game show called 'Play for a Billion' in which the game show is tied directly to Pepsi's bottle cap sweepstakes.

"You're going to see a lot more of this," says Dave Burwick, chief marketing officer, Pepsi-Cola, North America. "It's so much more difficult for a 30-second ad to stand out these days. . . . When you control the content, you develop the exact message you want."

This USA Today article discusses this trend and explains what other major marketers are doing in this area.
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