Owning the Means of Production: Brands do Content

MarketingVox is linking to a story in USAToday about brands creating their own content. There's definitely nothing new about this concept. P&G used to own (and still might..I'd have to check) soap operas. That is, they were created by P&G Studios and the P&G owned the rights to them.

You can definitely see how the idea has gained so much favor, and it is really the long-term fallout from the Internet revolution. When we started advertising online, we realized that the ad had to be interesting and valuable in its own right. So, naturally, the ads started to evolve into content.

The question then becomes, how far can this go? Well, in the USA Today story, to the extreme, where the content is compelling enough to capture interest for a full 30 minutes.