The soap opera genre was invented at Procter and Gamble’s request

Evidence

Freston consulted Fred Silverman (whose programming had revived CBS in the early 1970s), and he suggested hiring Mary-Ellis Bunim. Over the previous decade, she had run one of the great legacy soaps, As the World Turns, a never-ending story of family drama and romance that had been running for some thirty years. Since its 1956 debut on CBS, it had been sponsored by the same soap company, Procter & Gamble, for which it had been created by Irna Phillips herself, the inventor of the genre. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 821

Categorization

• CANDY: The fact that soap operas were literally created for soap companies is a fun slice of media history, though fairly well-known.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the economic logic of content-as-commercial-infrastructure; the genre’s naming after its sponsors is a classic attention-market arrangement.