With more than 400 original series on television this year and only so much time on air to promote new shows, viewers are overwhelmed. As a result, networks are looking for new ways to bring their shows online to the fans.

For fans in the teen or millennial demographics, that means YouTube. And on YouTube, they’re engaging with these shows via episode recaps.

There is nothing new about episode recaps. MTV has been posting weekly recaps for shows since 2007, and as any teen can tell you, recaps fill YouTube’s feeds on a daily basis. They are everywhere online.

And there’s a good reason for that. There is so much TV, what better way to stand out, excite the almost-fans and further engage superfans than by touching base each week after that gasp-worthy moment or that never-could-have-guessed-it twist?

Recently, in the spirit of breaking through the clutter, marketing teams have gotten extra-creative with their weekly recaps, going to innovative and inspiring lengths to ensure those fans are watching every week – and often more importantly, spreading the word.

ABC Family’s Stitchers, for example, saw the episode recap as a perfect way to launch its summer sci-fi hit. By simply adapting a popular theme in the sci-fi genre, ABC Family was able to playfully talk to its audience about the new series while also introducing a new type of show to its Becomer audience. Just add action figures.

“We knew we were introducing a show in a genre that is not what our audience has come to expect from us,” said Stacy Asturias, VP of creative at ABC Family, “so we were looking at ways to welcome an audience that doesn’t normally expect this type of programming from us, to super-serve them.”

The network decided on episode recaps for Stitchers using specially made action figures – a popular, familiar trope in sci-fi. ABC Family even created the action figures for each main character of the show and posted unboxing videos (very popular in the YouTube world) of each actor opening their action figure selves.

Then ABC Family handed the reins off to promo producer Ty Andrade, the narrator of these videos who brings her own fandom to the recaps along with a playful, tongue-in-cheek style along with which viewers can identify and laugh. (She calls the heroine’s estranged father “Dad/Not Dad” and has action figures questioning their own lack of movement.) Asturias said that it was important for the tone to match the show, which doesn’t take itself too seriously.

“We wanted to jump in and play in that sandbox in a really authentic place from loving the show and beings fans ourselves,” said Asturias.

Asturias added that the format of the episode recap was perfect for its audience, who are largely teen and 20-sometimes spending a lot of their time online with YouTube anyway. On top of that, its demographic tends to watch a lot of its content after the fact, with DVRs or catch-up viewing, so these recap videos serve to remind viewers where the show has been and where it’s going as they catch up with the action.

And as fans catch up, they also (hopefully) bring in new fans, who become superfans.

Asturias says that each video like this is different according to the network, but for ABC Family, the target is the already-confirmed viewer. “The hope is that they will find the recaps fun and entertaining enough that they will post and share them.”

The shareability of the recaps is key. Each episode recap lives on YouTube, but is shared everywhere.

“Word of mouth is very powerful in the social space,” said Asturias. “Friend recommendations carry a lot of weight. A bite-sized piece of content to go along with that that is amusing makes it that much more shareable.”

Asturias added that quite simply, there is only so much airtime that networks have to further promote their own shows once a series has launched, so recaps are perfect pieces of “evergreen content” that can be linked, shared, posted, reposted, even repurposed for marathons if the show is so lucky.

MTV has been posting recaps for select series for years, but one show that has really taken off in the social space is Teen Wolf.

Its illustrated episode recaps take things to a new creative level as well, imitating comic book graphics in a weekly roundup of the teen show. And this isn’t even the only companion piece to Teen Wolf – MTV also has an After After Show, a weekly video hosted by fellow fans with segments from the cast.

“Our goal with Teen Wolf from day one was to foster and grow a fandom for this show, knowing it takes a certain kind of show to make that kind passion,” said Matt McDonough, MTV director of digital strategy and fan engagement. “We’ve always done recaps across TV, using footage and narration, but the fandom outgrew that - they wanted something a bit deeper.”

McDonough said he met superfan Kendra Wells at a fan convention where she created artwork on commission based on the story and characters of Teen Wolf. Her work is also incredibly popular by fans on Tumblr, where fan art lives and thrives. Kaitlyn and Amanda (aka The Wolfpack Girls) racked up thousands of views performing raps in their college dorm room about Teen Wolf and posting to YouTube beginning with season one.

So MTV enlisted these real-life fans to host the Teen Wolf recaps, giving them episodes in advance and letting their creativity flow. Wells illustrates each video and The Wolfpack Girls host and narrate, giving the videos an extra note of authenticity.

“The fans have always been the voice of Teen Wolf since the beginning,” said McDonough. “We had fans that knew more about the show than most of the people who worked here. In hiring fans, we wanted to continue that voice of the fans in the show. They impact the show as much as marketing does.”

The Teen Wolf strategy is part of MTV’s larger fan initiative, getting fans involved as brand ambassadors in real, day-to-day ways – in this case, hiring them on as interns at MTV. Kaitlyn and Amanda (The Wolfpack Girls) are now actually employees at the network, offering their voices to fan campaigns.

And this structure works out perfectly for Teen Wolf’s recaps, because they’re less about actually going scene-by-scene to explain what happened and more of a “fan freakout,” according to McDonough, for already-confirmed fans of the show to share with friends.

McDonough also says that while episode recaps are really dictated by the individual show’s fandom first and foremost, the next show at MTV that speaks directly to this kind of fan engagement might be The Shannara Chronicles, with a built-in audience from the Terry Brooks books who can lead that conversation online when the story is brought to the network.

“The marketing advantage to these is we can own that conversation by creating the recap, but we’re entering it into a conversation that is already in progress,” said McDonough. “It’s really more powerful having our fans speak to the content.”

And in USA’s social recaps for legal series Suits, the fans directly speak to the content, in which a host combines plot points to talk about reactions to the plot by fans online.

Sponsored by Lexus, USA’s Suits social recaps briefly go over the week’s episode as fan tweets and posts pop up on the side of the screen. Host Johnathan Fernandez, appropriately garbed in a nice suit, is known as the #SuitsCritic, reacting along with fan tweets each week.

YouTube videos are posted weekly as brief sneak peeks of the full video, but fans have to go to USA.com to see the full version.

MTV goes even one step further beyond all of these, posting episode recaps of shows not even on its own network.

In its Game of Thrones recaps with characters as peanuts (yes, peanuts), quick scenes with funny dialogue and speech bubbles put a humorous spin on even the bleakest moments.

According to Daniel Montalto, VP of MTV News, the idea isn’t to attract attention to competitors’ shows but to enter into the cultural conversation already in progress with the MTV audience. Previously, MTV has posted similar recaps for American Idol and Glee when those were the prevailing shows for the MTV demo. But for the MTV audience now, that’s Game of Thrones.

Montalto says it’s all part of MTV’s Always On initiative, “designed to create a 24/7 conversation with our audience about what is interesting them the most in the world around them. For MTV News, the focus is to both drive and participate in the cultural conversation with our audience across all platforms.”

And MTV understands that its audience’s conversation doesn’t entirely center on its own programming, so in an effort to take part in its viewers’ online community, that means expanding what the network brand means past its content.

“We find embracing all of our audience’s interests – whether on MTV or another network – as an amazing way to keep an ongoing, real-time conversation with more fans across more platforms than ever before,” said Montalto.

If nothing else, viewers watching Game of Thrones recaps, or Teen Wolf recaps, means that people are seeing the MTV name in one more way amidst their daily viewing binge or online search. And for any network, that’s a huge win among a generation that’s slowly forgetting network names in favor of shows and scrolling YouTube more than the channel guide.

Tags:


  Save as PDF