Creative Merger: Viewing Serialized, Web-Based Storylines as a Creative Avenue Toward Marketing Success

Through my thesis project, I’m trying to gain an understanding of web-launched, serialized storylines as both a creative art form, and marketing tool. Mini, serialized webisodes offer all the advantages of a syndicated television show with few of the drawbacks. They are a creative medium through which you can continually examine and reexamine the stories and interactions of a select number of fictional characters. In other words, webisodes surpass films in their capacity for emotional and creative depth simply by offering the possibility to emotionally text and explore your characters an infinite number of times rather than once for a two-hour block of time. Unlike a television series however, webisodes are unconstrained by pesky running times (they can be 3-5 minutes rather than 23), and censorship.

Webisodes are also a great medium through which to explore and learn about theories of marketing practices. Television shows have the benefit of entire firms solely devoted to promoting their success. With webisodes, you are forced to be your own promoter, and to successfully deal with internet-based advertisers should the serial become widely viewed. It is a wonderful discipline because it is a creative venture steeped very deeply in economic/marketing principles.

Webisodes are an interesting creature. You have to create characters that are entertaining in only five minutes, yet who will have enough creative life to be sustained over a long overall period of time. They have to leave the viewers wanting more, but never unsatisfied. It is a difficult balance to strike, one which poses significant challenges in writing, editing, and performance. I want to discover firsthand, precisely how an artist might go about creating such characters, and such environments.

Yet, I am also determine as to how a businessman might promote such an endeavor, how he might sustain it financially through advertising contracts and the like. There can be much creativity not only in art, but in business as well, with webisodes standing firmly as a glaring “case in point.”

In the creation of these webisodes, I want to help my viewers understand how this mode of serialized storytelling is created and popularized. By keeping a firsthand-account-via-blog of the entire creative/fiscal/economic process of creating a webisode series, I will be providing a valuable instruction manual not only for creative artists but for intellectual and technological theorists as well. How are such art forms created? What are their benefits and drawbacks? How are they sustained and popularized? And what does their failure or success mean for the future of film and television as creative/fiscally successful mediums? I have no idea… yet. But, I do intend to find out.