These Shows Understand Why TV Cannot Survive Without The Internet … And They’re Doing Something About It

Want to know the dirty little secret of the TV industry? In 2017, no matter how unique your show is, it is only as good as your digital department. Sure, the pundits are telling us that we’re living in the Golden Age of Television, aka Peak TV, but we all know what that really translates to is “I don’t have time to watch all these new TV shows.” So how do we decide which of the thousands upon thousands of shows to watch? The Internet. That’s what matters.
If you star in or host or produce or write a television show, you should know this: We need you and we love you. That said, as great as your show may be, the Internet is where people hear about your show. Sometimes from the stars or the network, but more often from their friends and their social media timelines. It’s how they discover a new show, with an image, a tweet or, best of all, a viral clip. People want to feel like they are a part of something, like they’ve witnessed the same thing their friends have, so as soon as a television show’s content hits the Internet, in whatever form it may take, it is liked, retweeted, commented on, and absorbed. (Hopefully!) Some shows get this, and some are, shall we say, experiencing a bit more resistance to this change.
The thing is, your TV show lives and dies by the Internet now. The end. If you want your show to do well, you’ve got to figure out what this means for your show specifically, because what works for a comedy doesn’t always work for a drama, what works for weekly premium cable shows doesn’t always work for streaming originals, and talk shows are in a league of their own. Clips are the currency of the Internet, and networks must provide these in order to boost the conversation (which, in turn, boosts ad dollars). Being involved with social media is no longer a novelty, it’s a necessity for any show. A TV show doesn’t just live in a screen anymore, it has to flood all of our screens, essentially. These shows must be accessible, available, tweetable, and most of all, malleable to all of these factors.
The Internet owns your show now, whether you want them to or not. Give the Internet your show. Let them have it, let them watch it, let them absorb it. People have got to be able to access your content, whether it’s a full hour-long drama or even a silly gif response to a tweet on any portable wifi-connected device they carry with them.
We spoke to the people behind the shows that get it, that are using the Internet to their advantage, and it’s paying off in a real way for them. As the lines continue to blur between television and the Internet, these are the keys to keep in mind, from the people who know best.

FIND YOUR FANS

Gone are the days where networks could simply spend a whole bunch of money on posters and promo spots and audience would show up and tune in. Now, shows must first identify and then directly seek out their fans wherever they congregate to make sure that they’re impossible to ignore.
“Especially when you’re a new show, you want as many people as possible to see it. Fewer and fewer people are watching in real time on their TVs and watching the next day instead, so I think it’s incredibly smart that the show has made such an effort to make the show available in all the places where people view content,” Carol Hartsell, Managing Digital Editor of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, explained to Decider. Her colleague Mitra Jouhari, Digital Producer/Writer’s Assistant, echoed that sentiment, saying “From the beginning of the show there was a priority to make sure everything got online as quickly as possible after the show aired so that the most people possible can see it.” For their show, this means uploading clips to YouTube at 2am EST, immediately after the show has aired on the west coast.

Desus & Mero on Viceland doesn’t even wait until the show is over, it’s available on YouTube at the same time it’s airing on TV. “If it’s a new show, people don’t know exactly what it is. You want to be as accessible as possible so people can see it and get drawn in,” Mero said. “Now you see people talking amongst themselves on social media like ‘How do I get Sling?’ So people end up going back to the old school version of it, but even if they don’t, they’re still aware of the show. Other networks, they don’t do that. They make it really hard to access, which is counterproductive to making a show blow up.”
His co-host Desus went on to say, “It’s about the content coming to you, not you going to the content. We’re not punishing you for trying to watch the show. We have a lot of people who do not watch cable, who don’t have cable, because who can afford cable nowadays, it’s really expensive! Even the fans can’t believe how easy it is to watch the show, and because it’s so easy to watch, I think that also helps people put other people on to the show. It’s just like, yo go to YouTube, it’s right there. If you just make it easy for people to watch what they want to watch, they’re gonna stick with it and tell more people about it.”
Making a show so easy to watch and surely benefitted Desus & Mero which launched this past fall and is growing rapidly. “I feel like a lot of our success has been based on word of mouth, so Vice is really good about putting up entire episodes but also about putting up little 4 or 5 minute segments that really hit, that will really hook a new viewer. If I’m your friend and I’m like. ‘Yo you gotta watch this dope show, they did this amazing joke,” and then I give you that moment, you’ll see that moment and you’re like ‘Yo I want to watch the rest of this shit,’ and then you can watch the whole 22 minute episode.”

Which is why HBO remains such a conundrum in this conversation. The network made the wise decision to make clips from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver available after each Sunday night’s show, but that’s it. No other show on the network provides shareable clips from episodes (save for trailers and behind the scenes stuff). Like, where is the clip of Lena Dunham pulling a Sharon Stone Basic Instinct on last season of Girls? I mean, a censored clip, sure. But the whole Internet was talking about that moment the next day, and being able to share that clip could mean new viewers to the series.
The same goes for this fall’s buzzy comedy Insecure, a show that did a good job with their social media, as many viewers took to the Internet to share their thoughts on the latest relationship ups and downs of the show. So, why do 3 other YouTube accounts have more views on a “Broken Pussy” clip than the official HBO account? Something went wrong here, because imagine the reach it could’ve had if HBO promoted it, especially the fact that it aired within weeks of what is now known as the Billy Bush debacle. They could’ve had a worldwide meme on their hands! To its credit, the show did make the first episode of the series available on YouTube, but to follow up with clips (like Issa and Molly’s fancy day!) would’ve been a home run.
FX also saw the benefit of putting the first episode of Atlanta up on YouTube. The show did well with critics, at the Golden Globes, and for the network. But again, this is the same place that made it a near puzzle to see the most recent season of The Americans leading up to its nominations at both the Emmys and the Golden Globes. Come on, FX! Give the Internet a little taste of the delicious ice cream sundaes that are your programming.
Clips have proven to be essential for a show like Conan as well. Team Coco’s head of digital, Steve Beslow, attributes this to the many different kinds of fans of the show. “We have a few different types of audience and we try to get our content to all of them. We’ve got that core audience that is Conan-centric and loves seeing everything he does. We’ve got a general comedy audience that just likes comedy bits whether Conan’s in them or not, and then we’ve got your general talk show audience, people interested in celebrities, the people he’s talking to, and then stand-up comedy and music. All those different categories of audience connect and engage with different things. Conan has, and for the most part always has had, the youngest audience in late night and with that brings really, really savvy comedy fans. But also brings the audience that’s the least likely to consume our content in a traditional way.”

It will come as no surprise that Conan’s best performing YouTube videos feature his driving segments with Kevin Hart and Ice Cube in the top 3, with his adventures joining Tinder with Dave Franco and visiting a Korean spa with The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun not far behind. Everyone likes to see Conan in unusual, out-of-the-studio experiences, and TBS has apparently noticed (at least judging from some of the rumors around a potential re-jiggering of the show’s focus and production schedule).
By making his content so widely accessible, it’s not just people who are choosing to watch online rather than on the TBS channel they have at home; it’s also people who have never heard of TBS. “Conan moving around has spawned, especially the travel shows, a whole different type of engagement. When he went to Korea, the amount of excitement for his arrival was just incredible because we’re not on TV in Korea. We’re not on the air. So the only way these people knew him, and most of them were under the age of 20, these were not older folks, they know him from his Internet bits, especially his remotes and the pieces that we do. The ‘Conan’ of it all has become much more engaging, and people are aware that he is on the move more than the competition and he’s willing to still do things that no one else is doing out there and those are the things we get certainly the most response to.”
Not every show has to look far from home to find the fans. In the case of The Mindy Project on Hulu, the fans are right there, working on the platform’s digital team. “It really starts with us being superfans of the show ourselves,” Lindsey Pearl, head of social media at Hulu said. “We really understand what it is that fans of the show love about Mindy Lahiri and this world that Mindy Kaling built for her. We know that it’s the fashion, it’s the family, it’s the love, her romances, it’s food and it’s wine. It’s clear as day to us at this point what it is that fans really love about the show and that’s really what we like to lean in to.”

That they do. The Mindy Project, which jumped from Fox to Hulu after season 3 of the show, is certainly a different example as Hulu is not a television network that comes in your cable package. You need to have a smart TV and a subscription to the site to access its content, which includes original programs such as The Path (which they just made the entire season 1 available on YouTube ahead of the season 2 premiere), Casual and Shut Eye, as well as network shows like The Bachelor, This is Us, and NBC late night shows. But what The Mindy Project —and, to a greater extent, Hulu as a whole— understands so well about the Internet is how to target an appeal directly to the fans of their shows on social media. There is no shortage of Mindy gifs, fashion pics, and short clips highlighting jokes from the show. As Pearl broke it down, the strategy includes showing the diehards that you get them and you’re one of them, so much that it intrigues noobs, gets them curious, and eventually brings them into the show. “If you can curry favor with the existing fans really, really well and prove out how well you know the audience with a ton of engagement on your content, then that signals to the friends of the superfans or someone who might not be initiated, that there’s a lot of love for this show. While the intent is always to build as much love with that superfan, we know that if we can do that really, really well, we have a chance at bringing in new people.”

WHAT HAPPENS ON THE INTERNET, STAYS ON THE INTERNET

Not long ago, here’s how the conversation cycle went: a show would air, you’d go to bed, recap it with your friends and coworkers in the morning, and then move on with life until the next week. Well, not so much these days. As Ana Breton, Digital Producer at Full Frontal noted, “Since we’re only once a week, one of the strategies was to spread our content throughout the week and come up with original things throughout the week to keep people engaged with our content.” Plus, that’s not the only way the former correspondent for The Daily Show is keeping viewers engaged with the topics she discusses on the show. “One of the cool things that this show does I haven’t really seen other shows do, because there’s such a heavy research component to each episode, every show and every clip from the show has extras associated with it on the website,” Hartsell said. “So if you want to read more on the topics, you can scroll below the video and find all these cool articles that will give you a deeper understanding of what we’re talking about.”
Theoretically, a show like Full Frontal can keep viewers engaged long after the show has finished airing on TV. But what about a show like Desus & Mero, which airs half-hour episodes Monday through Thursday nights on Viceland; are viewers reacting at 11pm eastern when it’s live, or the next day, or even later in the week? “The response is always big live which is dope to witness because it doesn’t happen a lot,” Mero revealed. “It’s usually these big shows, like a big Game of Thrones that get people to really watch live. A lot of people watch this show live and then they also just take the Internet segments and digest those throughout the week which is ill. You’ll do a show on Monday and people are still talking about it on Wednesday, even when you did 2 episodes in between. People just are watching it live and then re-watching it online.”

“If you can curry favor with the existing fans and prove out how well you know the audience by getting a ton of engagement on your content, then that signals to the the uninitiated that there’s a lot of love for this show.”—Lindsey Pearl, Head of Social Media at Hulu

Pearl has found a similar situation to be true for fans of The Mindy Project, noting that, “While we do see that some fans do flock to the episode the moment that it becomes available on the service, they really can watch it anytime and that does inspire this longer tail of engagement, where the fan isn’t so focused on that one tune-in moment. They can pick and choose the moments where they’re consuming the show and therefore they’re probably more likely to engage across platforms in the same way that they watch whenever they want.”

YOU CAN’T BE EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE

Ah, engaging across platforms. Now here’s where it gets tricky. Yes, a TV show needs an Internet presence. But it doesn’t need to have every Internet presence possible. For The Mindy Project, Pearl has found that Instagram seems to be the best place to focus their resources.

“Now with Instagram Stories, there so much more that we can do and there’s longer-form storytelling that we can do. For example, through Instagram stories, with new episodes launching on Tuesdays, on Fridays we will do a tap to reveal an upcoming outfit. It’s super fun and the fans love it, we see a ton of engagement on those. It is a really good example of how we are doing something unique on that new emerging platform.”
The key here is realizing that what works so well for Mindy on Instagram might not work the same on say, Snapchat. “When it’s a property that in its fifth season, to expand to new platforms isn’t always the best approach. While sometimes it can seem like a shiny new object and there a lot of lure to being on Snapchat, to invest the time and energy and the resources into doing something really kickass on that new platform, might not be the best use of everyone’s time, essentially when we know that on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Hulu’s YouTube channel and on Tumblr, that we already have very rabid audience. And if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”
Beslow has a similar strategy for Conan, explaining, “The editorial team and the digital team, we sit and watch the show everyday and clip out the show essentially minute by minute, clip by clip and, then assign those individual clips to platforms. That doesn’t mean that the clip that shows up on YouTube will be exactly the same as the clip that shows up on Facebook. We might have a segment that’s four and a half minutes long, but there’s a really great 30-second chunk that stands on its own. That’s not gonna fly on YouTube, especially if you have to watch a 15-second pre-roll before it, but it’s a perfect piece of content for Facebook or Instagram and so we’re certainly not afraid and were very happy to portion out different pieces of content to different platforms.”
But in a few months? It’s looking like Facebook will be the best place to get all things Conan. “I think by the end of this year, that will be the vast majority. It seems like that’s the biggest growth area for us, and the inroads we’ve made there have been great,” Beslow predicted. “Everyday there’s another social media platform that you can invest in content wise and so it;s really about making smart picks and there are definitely more opportunities to waste your time than there are to invest properly.”

A show like TruTV’s Billy on the Street has really thrived by putting clips on Twitter. Recently, a segment celebrating the end of the show Bones was a huge hit, and involved host Billy Eichner running around with a bone in his hand and catching NYC pedestrians off guard; equally, a bit where he asks gay people how they feel about John Oliver, while Oliver awkwardly stands next to him, also went viral. They don’t need much explanation or commentary, people just want to retweet and share them to their timelines with a small “Love this” or “So funny.”
While Hulu’s got a great grip on how to use social media for a show like Mindy, that doesn’t mean it translates to all the other originals they promote online. “It’s understanding that not every show is going to be a ‘social show’, there’s no such thing as a one size fits all content strategy for every single show,” Pearl pointed out. “Dramas behave very differently in the digital space than comedies do. We have to tailor our plans to understanding the differences in those audiences and understanding what their behaviors are. It’s what keeps us up at night and what makes every campaign unique. It definitely impacts which platforms we decide to lean in to. It impacts the volume of micro-content we make available. The willingness of talent to partner with us and engage also impacts the decisions that we make in our social strategies.”

THE TALENT HAS TO “GET IT”

No matter how talented a given network’s digital department might be, the ultimate key to online and social success rests with the show’s talent. They have to be willing to promote the show, to remind their followers when and where to watch it, and they have to be personable and give us a look at their own lives, really. “For Mindy, Instagram is a really strong platform. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that Mindy herself is very active. It’s clearly there for you when you look at The Mindy Project’s own social channels, you can see just how engaged and involved the cast is and it just makes it all sing and we really do take a lot of cues directly from Mindy, she’s a wonderful partner to us. The fact that she has such a strong foundation in social makes our jobs so much more fun and a lot easier,” Pearl said.
Ever since Conan landed at TBS and Team Coco was born, he’s used the Internet wisely. “It goes back to Conan announcing tour dates for the tour he did after The Tonight Show on Twitter and using that to become what you would recognize as the Louis C.K. model,” Beslow said. “Just directly addressing fans and directly communicating to them; he would do direct address YouTube videos to fans well before that was a normal thing in the run up to the TBS show. Just the general sense of knowing that the Internet in general, and obviously social media in particular is such a great way to access your fans directly. Conan has always been one of the first and one of the best at doing that.”

Because fans have gotten the chance through the web to connect and feel like they know Conan, it could be the key to those ultra successful “Conan in the wild” videos that continue to perform for the show. “Because we are just completely assaulted with content all the time, I think people really respond to the authenticity of Conan out on the street interacting with real people. Even though he’s just as funny in the studio, it’s something they’re a little more used to seeing and that other people are also capable of doing. There are very few If any people who are capable of going out into a real life environment and being as funny as Conan O’Brien.”
“I think he would do everything we ask him to do. I think our audience has seen a lot more of Conan this past year than before, we’ve done a ton of YouTube and Facebook Live Q&As, every time he goes on a travel show we’ll do a Q&A, he’s taken over our Instagram account, he started that with the Korea trip and has continued in the nine months since then and I think that the audience has really responded to that. If there’s one thing they want more of it’s just more Conan.”

RATINGS? WHAT ARE “RATINGS”? DO YOU MEAN “LIKES” AND “SHARES”?

Here’s the less fun part. Most TV shows still depends on Nielsen ratings, which helps determine how much they can charge advertisers for spots that will run during the show. It’s how they make their money, along with sponsorships and brand deals. But how well is your show really doing on TV if people aren’t interested, aren’t talking, or even aren’t accessing it on the Internet? “While at the end of the day you have to have (linear) ratings — that’s the currency of TV — but the engagement levels online, that’s very important to Vice,” Desus said. “You have networks that were established and then at some point they had to spin off and create their digital unit and their social media stuff, where as Vice, they had the social media in place before they even had the network. So they come up with strategies and they’re aggressive on social media but not in a way where its spammy. They’re not forcing the show on people. So we get the numbers, and they’re very happy with both [the ratings and digital numbers]. And I don’t want to get my Trump on and brag but we’re winning bigly online and offline, huge numbers.”
From Beslow’s perspective, “We have a two-fold mission where which is obviously be as successful as possible digitally, but we are also the digital marketing arm of the TV show. So it’s really important to us that people know this is on four nights a week at 11 o’clock on TBS and making sure that they get a chance to actually watch the show the way it was designed. Late night shows in particular, and Conan especially, are ripe for clipping and getting the best pieces of content to the audience that will appreciate them the most. Back in say 2010, we were much more attached to a traditional business model of pre-roll, getting as many people to look at display media on teamcoco.com. We’re very lucky to have teamcoco.com, most of our competitors are forced to associate themselves with huge network websites but we’re able to run our own website. If you go to teamcoco.com/korea, you get a much more in depth experience on everything from interactive maps and behind the scenes footage and extra social media content than you’d be able to get at a lot of other places. But as the model for digital has changed and become much more sponsorship and branded related and a little less reliant on traditional pre-roll and display media, we’ve pivoted to become much more platform agnostic, which has really helped us reach our audience. Since they’re so young, they tend to be on a variety of platforms, so we’ll go and find them where they are instead of trying to force them to come to us.”

“While at the end of the day you have to have (linear) ratings — that’s the currency of TV — engagement levels online are very important to Vice. I don’t want to get my Trump on and brag, but we’re winning bigly online and offline. Huge numbers.”—Desus, co-host of Vice’s ‘Desus & Mero’

So has the actual TV show changed at all, with digital in mind? “I do think whether its conscious or subconscious, the timing and pacing of pieces has become even more digital friendly,” Beslow admitted. “While you can feel the energy in the studio there’s no doubt that the writers are seeing the responses and the view counts online and realizing that those are resonating with people.” And for how much the ratings involve his job in the digital department at a show like Conan? “I would certainly say the ratings have little to nothing to do with any way that I think of my job. We are extremely lucky to have a ton of high quality comedy every day and how that plays on television is almost irrelevant to anything that we do. I would hope that no digital department is really effected by those things. I think we’re thought of completely separately, and certainly in my interactions with our executive producer Jeff Ross and Conan I don’t know that the word ‘ratings’ ever gets mentioned when we talk about the digital side. Essentially we have our own ratings system that is instantaneous and we know generally when we’ve done something that resonates with our audience or something that doesn’t.”
So what about digital ratings? How do shows interpret the social engagement they are seeing with clips, with tweets and with other online tools? Pearl was straight up in stating, “We look at everything. All digital engagement is engagement to us. We do see it as a strong signal of a consumers affinity for the Hulu brand and for that Hulu subscription. It’s the wild wild west of engagement metrics out there when it comes to social media. We love a partner called ListenFirst. We love their methodology because they really do look at digital engagement holistically, across platforms. They’re not just looking at tweets or just looking at Facebook likes, they look at the larger ecosystem and show you how your content is performing in digital engagement compared to other shows. Our audience has only so much time in their day, we can only hope to earn so much love and so much of that mindshare and so we try to use competitive metrics and benchmarking to understand how well we are engaging our audience.”

Hartsell at Full Frontal admitted, “I personally get excited when I see our column on Tweetdeck moving really fast right after we tweet something, but I’m not gonna get disappointed if I don’t see that.” And how do they know if that might be in their future? “If it’s something that’s making everyone in the office laugh their heads off, its going to do well online.”

THE INTERNET DICTATES WHAT A TV SHOW CAN BE

Bottom line? The relationship between TV and Internet needs to be symbiotic. A TV show gets its inspiration from the Internet, and the Internet is where the TV show can do things they didn’t have the time, among various other reasons, to pull off. What Desus brings from the Internet to TV, “It’s whatever we see, so it might be something from the Bronx or something hood, like a video trending on Black Twitter that hasn’t hit peak Internet saturation yet and hasn’t gone viral yet but you know early on its going to. Something like that we definitely jump on and talk about.” And this is at the network that he says “knew right off the bat” how to handle the show’s social media presence.
“Digital was being utilized terribly at the other place that we worked (before Vice),” Mero admitted. “They weren’t using digital to reinforce the show. To bring awareness to the show, give you the best parts of it. Early on when we were first starting with Viceland, they would put in the promos who we are, where we come from, our sense of humor, all that stuff displayed. They laid the groundwork with that before we even had our first episode. And when we came out with the first episode, all that shit was made available immediately to everybody. It wasn’t like sign up to get this, it wasn’t little teasers and sign up and you’ll get the rest. It was like, here’s the show in its entirely, enjoy it. The strategy is making good stuff that people are gonna want to come see as opposed to just chasing eyeballs like what is everybody else doing. It’s risky but it worked out really well.”
Again, Vice’s experience with the Internet is what the talk show hosts point to when it comes to the social strategy of promoting the show. But it should also be noted that the hosts of this particular TV show are products of the internet with continuously funny Tweets and podcasts. Desus explained, “They knew exactly because they got a sensibility that a lot of people at Vice already followed us on Twitter and knew of us and they were waiting for us to come. It was a no-brianer for us to end up at Vice. As far as the marketing strategy integration with social media, all we had to do was sit back. We didn’t have to say, ‘Hey set up this account, and do this and take a picture like this and tweet like this.’ They set all that up, it runs flawlessly, we have very few issue with social media stuff. There’s nothing on the social media side that we see and think we would never do this or this is off brand. That’s the important thing, as long as they get the brand and keep it consistent, we’re happy with it.”

Just as a TV show feeds the Internet content, the Internet also feeds a TV show content. Beslow has certainly noticed the difference at Conan, noting “Probably our most favored digital-only series are these scraps that we do that are essentially just outtakes and funny moments from rehearsal and things like that. It started just out of a goof, but that’s another great example of something that fans respond to. They are definitely a fan favorite to the point where now every year for the past 2 or 3 years, we’ve done a ‘Scrapisode’ where TBS actually airs a full episode of these outtakes set up by Conan. Now, when a funny thing happens in rehearsal or someone embarrasses themselves or a sketch just flops, you’ll hear someone scream ‘Scraps!’ more often than not, and there’s this realization that this is no longer just for us. Even these moments behind the scenes are a very real part of how we engage with our audience.”
So yes, something might be labeled a “web exclusive” but that doesn’t mean it’s not good enough to be part of the show. “The rule with Sam and Jo and the digital department is that it has to be as good of a joke that would go on the show. It’s not the leftovers, it has to be a quality joke in the voice of the show,” Hartsell said. “The main focus is on creating good half hour of television. The web is there for that extra content. At other shows, you generate tons and tons of content and a lot of it ends up on the floor because you don’t have time for it in the show, and I love that there’s such a value placed on the work that’s created here that it doesn’t have to be lost if it’s good and funny and is important.”
“Everything we do online is aimed to be an extension of the voice of the show, even the original content that we put out, it’s all in the same voice,” her co-worker Caroline Schaper, Digital Producer at Full Frontal said. “It might be a little snottier because the internet is full of little snots, but it is still a reflection of how we feel at the show.”
“One thing that’s different from last year is that the digital department has grown,” Breton from Full Frontal pointed out. “If that gives you any indication that more things are going to be produced, more things are going to happen.” They sure are. And they’re happening online. Stay tuned.