Standing in line at the Albertsons deli? P&G might show you a microdrama episode

Six years ago, Quibi bet its entire business model and nearly $2 billion on the idea that people would watch bite-size bits of content whenever they had a spare moment.

Now, with microseries becoming the hottest new thing, that very same idea is at the core of an ad campaign from Albertsons and Procter & Gamble.

Quibi made its expensive content for an audience that wasn’t yet primed by TikTok’s endless dopamine drip feed. These days, though, short-form content dominates digital media consumption–and with microseries producers like Holywater raking in tens of millions in investment from Hollywood giants, brands are following suit.

Crocs and JC Penney already introduced their own microdramas, and this partnership with Albertsons’ actually isn’t P&G’s first rumble either. Earlier this year, it launched 55-episode show The Golden Pear Affair, a soapy romance that pays homage to one of microseries’ top genres.

That show spotlighted P&G’s personal care brand Native and aired on a dedicated website where viewers had to unlock episodes by watching ads or outright paying. Its new series, Rico’s Tacos, is designed to advertise a variety of P&G products throughout different areas of Albertsons’ supermarkets. Rico’s Tacos is about a small family–a widowed father, his teen daughter, and his mother–running a taco stand. It airs in one- to two-minute episodes on the Albertsons app.

Within the store, only 15-second teasers are played. As The Wall Street Journal reports, these clips are shown in high-traffic and long-wait areas like entrances, deli counters, checkouts, and gas stations. Like we said above–it’s the same general approach as Quibi, except P&G isn’t betting that media viewers will choose to load up its show over other forms of entertainment. Instead, it’s just playing the show in a place they can’t leave.

Different episodes follow members of the family needing specific P&G products. In one, for example, the grandmother character heads to Albertsons to restock the truck’s supply of avocados, but snags a bottle of P&G’s Head and Shoulders shampoo while she’s there.

P&G is still taking a bet, though.

The goal of showing short clips (plus a QR code for further exploration) is to get shoppers to go to the Albertsons app, where they’ll “theoretically watch the [full] episode and do their shopping,” Lela Coffey, P&G’s VP of User Growth Acceleration for North America, told WSJ.

That’s the point where consumers will have to choose Rico’s Tacos over the smorgasbord of other content in their phones.

Brian Monahan, SVP of Albertsons Media Collective, told WSJ the concept of a “retail media network” isn’t novel, but that those networks (launched by brands like Walmart and Dollar Tree) have been limited to the usual search and digital display ads.

Albertsons wants to do development work on bigger productions that serve as both entertainment and ad, Monahan said.

“There is more than we can try together, and particularly with a partner like P&G that really understands consumers and where the market growth opportunities are,” he said.

Like with all ad campaigns, we’re curious to see the payoff in the data–especially since there’s plenty of comparatives to be found across social media and digital video platforms. How many people will watch full episodes of Rico’s Tacos? Will the featured products see a resulting sales bump? Did P&G greenlight Rico’s because The Golden Pear Affair saw success? We’d love to know.