They do not sound very radical: a low-budget film about a friendship between two boys living near St Pancras station and a play named after a freeze-dried snack.

However, Somers Town and Pot Noodle: the Musical are at the vanguard of a revolution that could transform advertising and possibly the entertainment industry over the next few years.

Somers Town, a British film directed by Shane Meadows and due in cinemas this month, cost only £500,000 to make. It has already won major awards at the Edinburgh and Tribeca film festivals.

But, however well it does at the box office and with the critics, it is destined to be remembered as the film that Eurostar paid for.

Similarly,Pot Noodle: The Musical is currently playing to standing ovations on the Edinburgh Fringe but seems unlikely to escape its status as the first stage show backed by a fast-moving consumer good.

Both projects were developed originally by Mother, a maverick London-based advertising agency. The company has set up a separate department to produce “content”, or entertainment that is only distantly related to traditional advertising.

It is one of scores of advertising and media agencies on both sides of the Atlantic that are turning themselves into content creators to connect their clients with an increasingly fragmented and sophisticated audience.

“The age of using adverts as a megaphone to yell at people and irritate them is coming to an end,” Ed Warren, one of the creatives who worked on Pot Noodle: The Musical said yesterday.

“If you are smart and have a message to get across you have to do it in a way that’s agreeable, sensitive and welcome.”

In this case the result is a riotous hour’s entertainment set in a Pot Noodle factory and very, very loosely based on Hamlet. It is directed by David Sant, of the comic theatre troupe Peepolykus, and, like Meadows on Somers Town, he had full creative control over the finished product.

One of the regulars from the Pot Noodle adverts is in the cast and the irreverent plot tallies with the product’s familiar brand message – but the show also succeeds as entertainment in its own right. It needs to.

Britons are bombarded with between 1,000 and 2,000 commercial messages every day and are becoming adept at “ad avoidance”.

Devices such as SkyPlus and online advert filters are enabling viewers to screen out traditional advertising, while the ever-increasing sprawl of TV channels and websites is making it harder for campaigns to stand out.

Product placement is one solution, particularly in the US where the legislation around it is less strict.

But even there, creating original content has a strong appeal of its own, according to Nick Chapman, brand strategy director at Venables Bell & Partners in San Franciso.

“Advertisers are realising that if they create their own content they don’t need to pay for ad space, they have greater control over how their brand is portrayed and ideally they create a more in-depth and involving interaction between consumer and brand,” he said.

There are precedents for this. Since the 19th century, brass bands in the North of England have been heavily branded with the names of the mill owners and mining companies that bankroll them. The earliest soap operas were so named because they were paid for by Procter & Gamble and other soap manufacturers.

There have also been one-off examples of original entertainment conceived by brands such as Fay Weldon’s novel The Bulgari Connection, paid for by the Italian jeweller, and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which grew out of a Disney theme park ride. What is new is the volume of these projects. Burger King has sold more than three million Xbox games starring characters from its adverts.

The US television network ABC is developing a comedy series called In the Motherhood which started as a web series promoting shampoo and a mobile phone company and drew more than 21 million online viewers.

The approach works for advertisers and for performers in an ever more competitive environment – but there are limitations to the approach.

Mr Chapman said: “There are two major problems though, preventing advertisers from whole-heartedly embracing this approach. Firstly you can’t really measure its impact, so these efforts don’t tend to get the bulk of the marketing budget but instead are ‘ad-ons’ to more traditional campaigns.

“Secondly, brands tend to want to be all shiny and positive while people generally prefer entertainment about complicated people doing stupid or dirty things to each other.”

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