An audience, after all, is only a group of people until a show starts. Seeing a play or movie at a theater is quite a different experience from watching television alone. Since most of their programming consisted of smaller-share offerings with devoted fan bases, we developed a campaign with a strong social component, hoping to re-create the communal experience of the theater using Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. Show promos would feature Twitter hashtags: since people were already talking about these programs, providing unified hashtags would give audience members a way to find each other.

Visual language was sophisticated but aimed mostly to frame content (as we had done previously with Comedy Central) within a simple rhetorical device, based on a three-word construction: “Watch. Listen. React.” And “react” could be any verb appropriate to a given program: seethe, wince, howl, and so on.