The Soap Opera Is Back
October 1, 2026
It is 90 seconds long, vertical, and brands are paying attention.
Welcome to this week's Takumi AI Brief.
Almost a century ago, consumer brands helped invent one of the most successful forms of entertainment in media history.
The soap opera.
The name was quite literal. Companies such as Procter & Gamble sponsored serialized radio dramas because they wanted to reach the people buying their household products. The programmes became so popular that the advertising funded the entertainment rather than interrupting it. (smithsonianmag.com)
Then advertising evolved.
We separated the entertainment from the commercial and spent the next few decades trying to interrupt people between the things they actually wanted to watch.
Now something interesting is happening.
Brands are making soap operas again.
They just happen to be 90 seconds long and made for TikTok .
01 · The Trend That Actually Matters
Microdramas have become a major entertainment format in China and are now gaining traction in the US.
These are short, serialized dramas designed for vertical feeds, usually built around familiar ingredients: romance, betrayal, humour and the cliffhanger that gets you into the next episode.
According to research from Snap and Ipsos cited by Digiday, 42% of daily social-media users say they watch short dramas every day. Brands including Crocs, Nuuly and P&G's Native have already created their own versions.
Some of the numbers are beginning to get difficult to dismiss.
Crocs ' first microdrama attracted almost 10 million views and quickly spawned a sequel.
Bob's Discount Furniture says its series Till Decor Do Us Part generated more than 152 million views and nearly $9 million in attributable sales. It has now commissioned another season.
There is still a genuine question around ROI. Not every microdrama is going to produce millions in sales, and marketers are still working out whether traditional campaign metrics make sense for the format.
But the behaviour behind the trend is more interesting than the format itself.
02 · People Aren't Opening Social to Follow Brands
They are opening it to be entertained.
Social media began as a place to connect with people you knew.
Then it became somewhere to follow creators and brands.
Increasingly, the feed itself is the entertainment.
TikTok , Reels and Shorts compete with television, streaming and gaming for the same finite resource: attention.
That changes what a brand is competing against.
Your competitor on TikTok isn't necessarily another footwear brand.
It might be a comedian, a creator, a football highlight or episode six of a love triangle someone discovered 20 minutes ago.
Which means being well targeted isn't enough.
You have to be worth watching.
That sounds obvious.
Advertising has spent years trying to engineer around it.
03 ·Maybe Brands Need Shows, Not More Content
This is where I think the microdrama story gets more interesting for CMOs.
Most brands have become very good at producing content.
Social posts.
Creator assets.
Product videos.
Campaign cutdowns.
And AI is about to make producing all of that dramatically easier.
Which creates an awkward problem.
If everyone can make unlimited content, producing more content stops being an advantage.
Attention does not expand simply because our content calendar does.
Microdramas take a different approach. They give people a reason to come back.
Characters can develop.
Stories continue.
Cliffhangers create anticipation.
An audience can become invested rather than merely exposed.
That moves marketing away from campaigns and closer to programming.
And perhaps that is what brands are rediscovering.
The objective isn't always to insert yourself into culture.
Sometimes it is to make something people willingly allow into theirs.
04 · If I Were in the CMO Chair
I would not tell every brand to go and make a microdrama.
Most probably shouldn't.
Formats get copied quickly, and nothing becomes uncool faster than every marketing department jumping on the same cultural trend.
I would ask a more useful question:
What could our brand create that people might choose to watch even if we weren't paying them to?
For some brands, that could be drama.
For others, comedy, sport, expertise, documentary or creators.
The format matters less than the shift in mindset.
We have spent years optimising how efficiently we can put advertising in front of people.
Perhaps we should spend more time asking whether the thing we are putting in front of them deserves their attention.
The CMO Takeaway
There is something wonderfully circular about all this.
Brands helped create soap operas because they understood that entertainment could earn the audience that advertising wanted to reach.
Then television created the commercial break and advertising became something that happened between the entertainment.
Social is beginning to bring those worlds back together.
Except the episode is shorter.
The screen is vertical.
And the viewer can leave with one swipe.
That makes the creative standard harder, not easier.
AI will make it possible for brands to produce more content than ever before.
But the scarce resource was never content.
It was always attention.
And the brands that win it may be the ones that stop asking how to make another ad and start asking a much older question:
What would people actually choose to watch?
Mohit Lodha, Founder, Takumi AI