The obituary pages do not often concern themselves with the people who sold things, or who figured out how to make other people want to buy them. The work of marketing executives tends to vanish into the ether of old campaigns and discontinued brands, leaving behind no filmography, no discography, no permanent record of the instincts that made them good at what they did.

Sheri Herman, who died Aug. 6 at 71, was one of those people whose résumé now reads like a time capsule of every moment when the media business was about to become something else.

Ms. Herman, who began her career producing television commercials at the New York boutique agency AC&R in 1980, went on to help transform a cable channel that ran film trailers around the clock into E! Entertainment Television. As senior vice president of marketing, she was responsible for brand development, publicity and sponsorships as the network's subscriber base grew from 2 million to 55 million — a trajectory that, in the cable era, constituted genuine scale.

But it was her subsequent work that now seems almost eerily prescient. As president of American Cybercast, Ms. Herman oversaw the 1995 launch of "The Spot," widely credited as the first episodic web series, viewable in the dial-up era on what was then called the World Wide Web. She conceived of embedding paid product placements and sponsored hyperlinks directly into the characters' online journals — a business model that would not become industry standard for another decade and a half. (Vevo, the music video platform launched by Sony, Universal and EMI in 2009, was later said to follow a structural blueprint Ms. Herman had developed for a previous venture in 1997.)

"Eyeballs will move from TV to PC," she publicly predicted at the time. This was the sort of statement that sounded grandiose in 1995 and obvious by 2010.

A hit-and-run accident in 2007 ended her career at 52. She is survived by her sister, the opera singer Nadine Herman.

Original story published in The Hollywood Reporter: "Sheri Herman, Former Executive at E! and American Cybercast, Dies at 71"