When Marketing Links Web and TV Realms IN the season finale on May 31 of "Touch," the Kiefer Sutherland drama on Fox, AT&T takes an unusual approach to paid product placement: showing characters using a mobile phone app that does not, in fact, exist. The app, Air Graffiti, is being developed by AT&T but is still a twinkle in the eye of developers, who say it is a long way from being available to consumers. The app will enable users to leave location-based messages for one another in a street-view map. In the episode, Mr. Sutherland points his smartphone at a building and sees a message - a series of numbers - that was written by his son. Highlighting what is only on the drawing board, which the company also does in some television commercials, helps promote AT&T as an innovation-driven company - and the message is aimed not just at consumers. "Our business is certainly with customers, but our business also is with Wall Street, and with the ecosystem of technology developers," said Esther Lee, senior vice president for brand marketing and advertising at AT&T. Now AT&T is introducing a Web-only series, "Daybreak," which is linked to "Touch" and will be promoted with a 15-second commercial during the season finale of "Touch," as well as on other Fox shows including "Bones" and "I Hate My Teenage Daughter." Online ads also will be aimed at "Touch" viewers through placement on the show's home page and on Fox.com. Tim Kring, who created "Touch," as well as "Heroes" and "Crossing Jordan," helped write and produce the online series. It will be directed by Jon Cassar ("24"). Five episodes, each about 10 minutes long, will be released, the first right after the "Touch" finale, and the rest over the next four Thursdays. The series will be what marketers call branded content, meaning that AT&T devices and services will be even more prominently featured than they are through a product-placement deal. Still, while phones, tablets and network capabilities are integral to the plot, AT&T will neither be mentioned by name nor sell the products overtly. AT&T spent $1.96 billion in advertising in 2011, with only Procter & Gamble spending more, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. Still, Ms. Lee, of AT&T, said branded entertainment like "Daybreak" serves a function beyond advertising. "Rather than doing advertising and P.R. only, we can further help people understand us if we are part of the cultural conversation," Ms. Lee said. When you encounter the brand through entertainment content, that conversation at the water cooler is very different. Plotlines for "Touch," which was recently renewed for a second season, are intricate. Characters from across the globe become intertwined through seemingly random events like lost-and-discovered smartphones, and through more deliberate means like social and video-sharing networks. An 11-year-old boy with autism who does not speak and is averse to being touched, played by David Masouz, has a clairvoyant sense of how these far-flung characters may harm one another. By subtly directing his father through numeric clues, they steer others toward a more harmonious course. No less complicated, it turns out, is how "Daybreak" came to be linked with "Touch." About two years ago, a team from BBDO, whose New York and Atlanta offices handle AT&T advertising, brought Ms. Lee a treatment for an online series that would highlight the interconnectivity of the AT&T network. David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer at BBDO North America, part of the BBDO Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group, called the concept a " "Bourne Identity"-type adventure." In it, the protagonist, Ben Wilkins, discovers a special dodecahedron, or 12-sided object, that places him at the center of a global conspiracy. But because producing the series and uploading it to the Web might not have found a mass audience, no matter how good it was, the idea languished for about a year, until representatives from "Touch," then in development, approached AT&T about product-placement opportunities. "It was like kismet that the show Tim Kring was creating had the same kind of adventure-mystery vibe as "Daybreak," did, so we decided we could share certain assets," Mr. Lubars said. Although some producers who work on the TV show also work on the Web series, it could not really be called a spinoff because it shares no characters. However, in the final three episodes of "Touch" this season, the show also featured a mysterious dodecahedron. "In essence the only real tie to "Touch" is this shape," said Mr. Kring of the dodecahedron he decided to incorporate into the series. But the theme of a connected world, of technology being used to create interconnectivity between people, is a shared value of the two projects. The Web series will appear on a dedicated Web site, as well as on YouTube and Hulu. The Web site will have additional videos and ancillary material like fictional redacted documents and, naturally, will promote the devices and applications used in the Web series. Devotees also can go to Jackboxers.com, named for a fictional group within the Web series, which will have even more material, and from which a mobile app for the show can be downloaded. While the Web series may at first ride on the coattails of the television show, the relationship will most likely be mutually beneficial, as fans of the TV show stay more engaged while awaiting fall's new episodes. Mr. Lubars, of BBDO, said that the collaboration is momentous. "Hollywood and advertising agencies have tried to work together before and there have been successes," Mr. Lubars said. But this time there has been a positive transmogrification to something really different, and the walls came down, and now there's this.