Case studies and web series: a case study

Preamble: Okay so my schtick is that I’m a playwright who used to teach playwriting and screenwriting and is now working for a regenerative agriculture startup. I’m starting to think out loud via occasional essays on LinkedIn as I figure out what dramatic writing can teach folks in the climate space. Despite evidence to the contrary, I’m actually a very focused writer when I’m in my genre but the world's burning so I'm working on that instead LOL

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For today’s intellectual experiment, I’m exploring marketing case studies as a genre of writing, in the hopes of analyzing it for the challenges and opportunities it presents… particularly for those of us working in the climate space.

What do I mean?

Stay with me:

A few years after I earned my MFA in Playwriting, I was offered the chance to teach a 200-level course in writing short films at Emerson College after a faculty member in the film department (someone who I now count as a cherished friend) saw a production of one of my stage plays.

“But I’ve never written a screenplay,” I protested, not unflattered.

She and others countered with different versions of “the principles are similar enough” and “you can fake it well enough.”

I quit my job and became an adjunct professor.

The fact that the course centered short films was a comfort: as a genre, shorts are subjective enough that I couldn’t do it “wrong,” especially because I was required to select my own film examples. I decided to focus on the films that I felt most qualified to center: the ones that contained the same building blocks as my favorite plays: character, conflict, subtext, theme, great dialogue.

“What is the difference between playwriting and screenwriting?” I asked myself. A book told me that if you “see” your idea for a story, it’s a film, and if you “hear” it, it’s a play.

I learned to pay closer attention to the visual cues in films and trust the student cinematographers in the class to point our discussion towards the opportunities that film uniquely affords. The class went well enough. I didn’t burn down the classroom anyway, and the students who were motivated wrote fine short screenplays.

Over the next five years, Emerson and other schools offered me additional courses because I kept not-burning-down-the-classroom: playwriting, dramatic literature & structure, writing short films for graduate students, comedic playwriting, writing for television, writing the web series.

Each time, I thought deeply about the differences between the distinct genres of screenwriting and playwriting—and the many subgenres within each.

“What is the difference between playwriting and writing for TV?” I asked myself. Plays have more permission to wander, and less of an obligation to hit the expected story beats.

As much as I wanted to philosophize about genre, what students needed was practical guidance about what you can do, what you can’t do, what you have to do, what works well, and what is risky once you’ve selected your genre. Industries have expectations. Especially TV.

But I was always the woo woo playwright who provoked the more rigid student screenwriters with “rules were meant to be broken” and a wink. And yet I also found myself reining in some of my favorite students who openly (and rightly) resisted the trappings of writing “rules”.

Had I somehow become a screenwriting rules apologist?

Not quite: I pointed out that not knowing the rules is different than understanding what the rules teach the writer. In other words: not knowing the rules is different than making the deliberate choice to break them. I had to learn about the opportunities that each genre offers and thus how to make the most of those opportunities (or create new ones.)

“What is the difference between playwriting and writing for web series?” I asked myself. I don’t know! What's a web series?

The “Writing the Web Series” course I developed is actually a really good example of what I mean. The term “web series” resists definition, but I decided to frame the class around fictional, filmed narrative content that is produced independently and distributed digitally. In other words: people who funded their own creative projects and slap it on YouTube or Vimeo. I acknowledged that there are professionally-produced web series, but resisted focusing on them because I decided that the point of the class is to focus on writing content that a recent college graduate actually could produce without any help.

In fact, I argued that part of the craft of writing a (good) web series is recognizing the genre’s unique ability to be a response to the genre of television.

The creator of a web series is announcing “I am outside of television, which is why I’m able to get away with doing this.” It’s a critique of television. It’s a subversion of television. It holds up the mirror to television. It can be kind of an audition-of-ideas for television.?Or it can be a "screw you, I didn't want your approval anyway" to television.

The “good” web series is “good” because it consciously does a thing that television isn’t doing.

And sometimes that thing is what draws television producers to hire the creators of web series to create television. The three most notable examples are?

1) Issa Rae, who built a loyal fan community for The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by listening and earning their trust while creating a satirical sendup of Black stereotypes with a sincerely compelling love triangle at its center—impressing HBO enough that they produced its “sequel” series Insecure;?

2) Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, who earned a Comedy Central adaptation of their web series Broad City by being the first to go all-in on an aesthetic of the Millennial female-driven horny stoner comedy; and?

3) Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld who used a limited means of production to their advantage by packaging an irresistibly earnest ethos in a premise so decentralized that they never needed to use the same location or actor twice—which they managed to maintain even after HBO relieved them of their financial scarcity.?

These three web series each helped to push television (okay setting aside “it’s not TV, it’s HBO”) in new directions. This is the power of sub-genres that push the envelope: they model what is possible. In these cases, they also opened the door to people without the traditional forms of access and privilege. (In fact, I consider the high-budget “web series” a form of gentrification.)

So let’s return to the question of this essay: what happens when we examine case studies as a genre of writing? And how can climate change companies, which hope to push the envelope, demonstrate their capacity to do so by resisting the confines of the case study genre??

What is the difference between playwriting and writing a marketing case study?

Let’s start with what’s the same: a case study, like a traditional play, uses an event to demonstrate a pattern.?

Death of a Salesman is a case study that uses the event of one day in the Loman family home to demonstrate the pattern of tragedy befalling those who stubbornly cling to the illusion of the American dream.

A traditional marketing case study uses the event of your company’s scope of work with a client and the pattern is that your company rocks and therefore should be hired again.?

What are the opportunities afforded by the rules of a marketing case study, and how can we improve on them in order to address the climate crisis?

Marketing case studies are versatile in terms of the format (fit them in a paragraph on a PowerPoint, keep a 500-1500 word version on your website, produce a multimedia documentary, etc.) but they generally follow three major rules:

1. The framing of the case study is a single scope of work with a single client, which illustrates the work that your company did with/for them.
2. The template follows a rough sequence: describe the background of a client and their problem, describe and evaluate the particulars of this client and their problem or objective, describe the proposed solutions, and then demonstrate (with charts, graphs, and pictures) how wonderfully it went.
3. The client is the “protagonist” and your company is the wise expert that provided the crucial assist they needed to achieve their goal. Luke Skywalker and Yoda.

I’m no expert on the subject, but I'd like to argue that companies that wish to address the climate crisis can do better than follow traditional approaches—including narratively.?

I’m testing a few theories about climate-related marketing case studies right now, and I’m genuinely interested for anyone who reads this to point me to their own discoveries and hypotheses. Naturally, they pertain to each of the “rules” I mentioned above:

1. The framing of a traditional marketing case study is a finite, transactional relationship between you and a client. It is inherently interested in that transaction. It focuses on a finite problem with a definite solution that definitely worked: an ineffective way of framing the experience of trying to address the climate crisis.

Think about what that leaves out: the interconnectedness of this work as it affects and was affected by other stakeholders. The relationship that existed beyond the transaction. The overwhelm of the intersecting problems. The doubt about suggesting a solution for an unprecedented problem. Can't a case study be emotional? Can't it loosen its borders?

1. Traditional structure lulls readers and viewers into a false sense of security and predictability. Interrupting patterns forces them to pay attention. I don’t know, I feel like a lot of climate-concerned companies talk all about being disruptive but don’t want to alienate the readers of their case studies by doing anything narratively disruptive. The playwright Bertolt Brecht (and his collaborators) taught us that jolting audience members out of their expectations is a way to actually engage their thinking and inspire them to take action.
2. Casting the client as the “protagonist” and your company as “The Solution Provider” maintains the idea that experts exist who have all the solutions. I’ve heard of a few historical figures who rise to power promising total expertise and those stories generally don’t end well.

Yes, the point of your case study is to demonstrate the “fitness” of your company. But remember: a company addressing climate change should be “fit” to address complex, intersecting, unprecedented problems. Demonstrate your fitness by showing us your thinking. Help readers see how you are fit to meet the challenges of uncertainty, how you test and discard hypotheses, how you educated yourself, and what you learned along the way.?This work is messy but you're good at dealing with messy, aren't you?

Also, what kind of collaborator are you? What is it like to work with you?

If this were your dating profile I’d tell you to mention the kinks that are important to you because otherwise you risk ruining the mood when you hand a paddle to someone who thinks that they’re weird! Worse yet, you're missing the opportunity to connect with the person who actually was looking for someone to spank and couldn't find anyone who said so. Own your kink and forget the kink shamers.

Sarah Manguso writes "Bad art is from no one to no one." I believe we have to be real to magnetize our people.

I’ve designed a template for my company’s case studies that structurally centers the developmental approach to client work, which prefers interim end states over supposedly definite fixes. I don’t think every company wants that kind of developmental approach, but do you know who totally does? The kinds of people my company wants to work with.

I wonder what templates y’all have cooked up to center the things that make your companies unique.

I think the climate space has the chance (and responsibility) to do case studies better. If you’re wondering what kind of template might structurally support the point you want to make in the world—or if you’ve figured out something that works—hit me up. I want to learn about this genre together.