TV seasons may be shorter than ever but marketing seasons never end.

That’s the takeaway from Josef Adalian’s long-ish read on New York Magazine’s Vulture on Thursday, elaborating on all the ways TV networks are working to keep their shows in the cultural conversation even when they aren’t on the air. And with TV seasons often running as short as ten episodes — HBO’s mega-hit Game of Thrones will return next summer with just seven episodes, the network recently confirmed — keeping those shows in the zeitgeist is a challenge.

Here are the top eight lessons to be learned by TV marketers from Adalian’s piece:

1) Promote the show year-round by promoting catch-up watching.

USA Network’s Mr. Robot, which is just getting underway with season 2, was arguably The Show of last summer. But when Mr. Robot concluded season 1, USA hardly packed up and waited for the following summer. Instead, it was “actively pushing audiences who’d heard the buzz about Robot to binge the show online, while figuring out ways to keep those already hooked thinking about the series up until its return,” Adalian writes.

“You can never stop messaging your franchise,” Alexandra Shapiro, executive VP of marketing and digital for NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment Networks group, told Adalian. “The moment you stop is the moment the fans stop paying attention.”

2) Consider airing more but shorter seasons.

That’s what TBS did with its slapstick comedy, Angie Tribeca, starring and created by Rashida Jones. But TBS had an advantage: it had already ordered the show’s second season, so the network had some flexibility as to when to bring it back. Networks don’t always have that much foresight or even the budget options to make that early call.

Still, having that scheduling opportunity made the marketing easier, said Brett Weitz, TBS programming chief: “The awareness of the show was so much higher because season one had just finished airing,” says TBS programming chief Brett Weitz. “We didn’t have to work as hard. We didn’t have to start from a walk — we were starting from a nice comfortable jog.”

3) Take a page from HBO and use critical acclaim to your advantage.

HBO was the first to realize that Emmys meant marketing opportunity. The premium network still banks on that (watch how many Emmys HBO takes home in September, with Game of Thrones and Veep both huge repeat contenders) but now others have caught on.

Lifetime had an unexpected opportunity to do this when accolades rained down on it for its reality spoof UnREAL. The network then decided to target other critics and TV influencers in the show’s off-season to try to get them on board, sending them a “binge-watch survival kit,” which included the entire first season to binge along with some snacks to keep viewers powered up through the coming watchathon.

“We were conscious of smart influencers we knew who liked the show,” Lifetime’s Rob Sharenow, general manager of Lifetime and A&E, told Adalian. “In season one, no one knew what it was. In season two, we already had a lot of critical accolades, and true fans of the show, in the communities we respect. So we went deep with influencers in all the marketing.”

Lifetime again took advantage of awards notice when UnREAL won a Peabody in April, right before Emmy voting began.

“The role critics and commentators play has been very elevated,” said Sharenow. “People want stuff curated, and they want their choices validated.”

4) Have a successful show? Spin it off.

Lifetime’s already done that with UnREAL, launching a digital spinoff called The Faith Diaries in April. AMC has done it to great effect with Fear of the Walking Dead, essentially allowing AMC to have a zombie hit on the air in all four quarters. And AMC even launched a spinoff of the spinoff, with digital series Flight 462 sliced into 16 short one-minute-plus installments to keep fans engaged in the off-season.

Of course, CBS has done this for years — for largely different purposes, but all of it serves to promote the shows in question — with its franchises CSI and NCIS. NBC has taken both Dick Wolf’s Law & Order and Chicago shows and turned them into multi-hour blocks of television that have run for years. For ABC, it’s just one word: Shondaland.

5) Take your show to Comic-Con.

This lesson is especially appropriate right now, when San Diego Comic-Con is just kicking off for the weekend. Any show with a whiff of genre is being represented in San Diego, with tons of virtual reality experiences, selfie stands with one gimmick or another, and real-life experiences, such as climbing walls, obstacle courses and scavenger hunts available for fans to participate in and then post all over social media. Voilà: free marketing.

6) Similarly, take your show to SXSW.

Mr. Robot was famously launched at SXSW 2015, with attendees treated to an early viewing of the pilot, which got the show off to a great start, word-of-mouth wise. This year, USA mounted an entire version of Coney Island, an important location in the series, to promote season two. As Sharenow said above, viewers are increasingly relying on trusted people’s validation before bothering to invest in a show, and influencers tend to be at these conventions in droves.

7) Think like a movie studio.

There are pros and cons to this argument, but AMC’s Charlie Collier has a point: “Television networks … need to become more like studios, reducing their reliance on first-window revenues and reorganizing around longer monetization periods,” Collier wrote earlier this year in an essay posted at Redef.com “This will likely make networks far more platform-agnostic over time and more focused on the duration and sustainability of intellectual property versus the immediate gratification of overnights (or even live+3 or live+7 ratings).”

In short, the long-tail matters. TV networks need to be less focused on how a show does in its initial premiere and more concerned about how it does in the long-term — and then focus on monetizing that performance.

8) Finally, and this is a favorite point of Adalian’s, if you have a show you truly believe in, have patience.

FX has shown plenty of patience with critical favorite The Americans, and while it’s never grown into high ratings, it did finally get the Emmy nominations many felt it deserved this year, and those nominations ultimately serve to burnish FX’s brand.

Similarly, AMC’s Mad Men was never a popular hit, but it permanently changed AMC from being a network that aired old movies into one of basic cable’s most premium brands.

Mr. Robot, while probably the buzziest show on TV right now, is not a huge ratings hit when you look at the linear numbers, with only a couple million people tuning in. But USA’s Shapiro says that across platforms more than 30 million people have watched the show.

“That’s a staggering number,” Shapiro told Adalian. “That’s not a linear Nielsen number. That’s a total audience number, when we look at all the legal places people see it. That number is how we keep ourselves motivated. We’re in this for the long haul.

“You used to judge success of a show based on the first 15 minutes of a premiere,” but that’s no longer the case, she says, due to the growing importance of digital and on-demand viewing. “Do we want to see growth in linear? Sure. But no one [platform] defines success.”

READ MORE: Vulture

[Image courtesy of Vulture]

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