Here's something unusual: Marketing software company Optimizely is rolling out an original microdrama.
The 36-episode series, available on the major social channels, features a small team of marketers trying to figure out who killed their CEO. Optimizely describes the series, titled "Murder in Marketing," as a "dark comedy."
Microdramas are growing in popularity. They generated more than 6.5 billion views on YouTube during the first half of 2026, with watch time increasing more than 50% compared with the same period in 2025. Reuters reported microdramas are expected to capture $1.5 billion in revenue in the U.S. this year, then nearly $2 billion in 2027.
But is the mobile-first, bite-sized entertainment format appealing to a B2B audience? Are microdramas a way to reach executives shopping for an AI platform that provides analytics and A/B testing? Even if the show involves many jokes about marketing, will corporate decision-makers spend their time watching 2-minute episode after 2-minute episode after 2-minute episode?
For Tara Corey, Optimizely's senior vice president of marketing, "Murder in Marketing" is a way to stand out in a sea of B2B sameness. To do something most wouldn't even consider doing.
"This was a really unique way to have our name associated with something very different," said Corey. "We're taking a chance."
Corey added that Optimizely, as a brand, only makes minor appearances throughout the microdrama. "It's not meant to be selling our product," she noted.
"The goal of this project was to make marketers laugh. To feel seen, not sold to," Julianne DeVincenzo, Optimizely's head of content marketing, said in a statement.
DeVincenzo was even more candid about the thinking behind the series in a recent blog post titled, "I put my career on the line to make a murder mystery for B2B."
One line from it reads: "I have spent most of my career making content, some of it good, some beautifully effective, and most of it excruciatingly boring, gathering cobwebs behind a form field until a stranger surrendered an email address in exchange for twelve pages about a problem they may not even have."
