Adults (Season 2)

For Season 2 of Hulu’s Adults, the show leaned into two major content pillars: influencer partnerships and behind-the-scenes embedded content. The show focuses on a group of twenty-somethings living in New York City and is built around a distinctly Gen Z experience, so it only makes sense that its social strategy is packaged in formats already proven to resonate with that audience.

On the influencer side, the strategy works particularly well because it ties directly into the show itself. In Episode 7, Paul Baker, played by Jack Innanen, is bombarded by New York City man-on-the-street content creators. Rather than letting that idea live only within the episode, Adults extended it into the real world by putting its cast in content with some of the same types of creators audiences already follow every day.

That led to collaborations with recognizable social series and creators including Track Star, Caleb Simpson, What’s Poppin? With Davis!, Street Hearts, Are You Okay? and more. Instead of asking influencers to promote the show in a traditional way, Adults inserted its cast into formats those creators’ audiences already know.

The second piece of the strategy is what happened when the cameras weren’t officially rolling. Adults utilized an embedded social media manager throughout Season 2 filming to capture content with the cast specifically for social.

That matters for a show targeting Gen Z. Highly polished promotional assets have their place, but lo-fi footage gives fans access to personalities, relationships, and moments they don’t get from the finished episode. With a cast from the same generation as much of the show’s audience, the content also feels natural rather than like talent being asked to recreate an internet trend they’ve never seen before.

More importantly, it gives the official Adults accounts something no fan page or entertainment account can replicate. Anyone can pull a clip from an episode. Only the people on set can show what happened between takes, inside trailers or while the cast was hanging out.

That exclusivity gives fans a reason to follow the show itself instead of simply waiting for clips to reach their feeds.

Chad Powers (Season 2)

Hulu’s Chad Powers went big to kick off Season 2 with a series of stunts designed to turn promotion for the show into entertainment of its own.

The first came during the cast’s press junket, where the Chad Powers social team partnered with Entertainment Tonight to send actor Colton Ryan, who plays Gerry, undercover to prank his co-stars. Ryan underwent three hours of hair, makeup and prosthetic application to transform into “Rick O’Connell,” a fake Entertainment Tonight reporter tasked with interviewing the cast.

The cast may have clocked him almost immediately, but they committed to the bit for a full 10-minute interview. One stunt ultimately created more than 10 pieces of unique content and generated millions of views.

That is a much different outcome than the typical press junket. Traditional cast interviews often rely on the same questions, the same talking points, and, eventually, very similar social clips. By building the interview around a stunt, Chad Powers still got its cast in front of the camera but created an environment where their personalities and chemistry could actually come through.

Chad Powers has also been popping up in the real world, particularly in places where football fans are already gathered.

When Glen Powell served as the guest picker on College GameDay ahead of Ohio State vs. Texas in Austin, the show had an army of Chads deployed throughout the city and surrounding tailgates. The concept later traveled internationally, with Chads appearing at the NFL game in Australia.

Instead of relying entirely on social targeting to find college football fans, the campaign physically showed up where those fans were already paying attention. If your show is built around college football, a matchup between two of the biggest programs in the country is about as concentrated of a target audience as you can get.

Sometimes working smarter means finding the conversation that already exists and giving people something worth talking about within it.

Earle Meets World

Netflix already had a major advantage when launching Earle Meets World: one of the world’s biggest influencers came with it. Alix Earle entered the series with a massive built-in audience already invested in her life, so the bigger opportunity was using that reach to introduce the show to people beyond her core following.

One way Netflix did that was by using Alix and her sister Ashtin to cross-promote its 49ers vs. Rams NFL game. From lingo quizzes to skits, the Earles crossed over into a different corner of Netflix’s audience while still operating in a world that feels familiar to Alix’s followers, given her existing connections to the NFL.

It’s a strong example of what can happen when a platform looks beyond the individual title it is promoting and considers the broader ecosystem around it. Netflix didn’t have to build a completely separate campaign to introduce Earle Meets World to sports fans. It could use another major programming moment already commanding attention and find an organic way to connect the two.

The same thinking carried over beyond football. Alix and Ashtin also appeared on Jake Shane’s Therapuss podcast, which now streams on Netflix. Once again, Netflix was able to connect multiple pieces of its programming through talent whose audiences naturally overlap.

For platforms with dozens of shows, live events and personalities under one roof, that kind of synergy is an advantage. Every title doesn’t have to build an audience from zero when another part of the platform already has their attention.

The Traitors: New Blood

Peacock’s The Traitors is not new, but doing a U.S. season without established reality TV stars is. By now, the franchise has a dedicated fandom and back-to-back-to-back Emmy wins, but New Blood introduces a different challenge: getting audiences invested in a group of people they don’t already know.

Without familiar reality personalities like Tom Sandoval or Lisa Rinna giving viewers an immediate reason to pick favorites, the people themselves have to become part of the campaign. That makes the show’s talent-forward social strategy especially important.

When the cast was announced, every player received their own introductory carousel on Instagram, immediately giving fans an opportunity to learn who they were before the season began. Since then, the social team has continued building those personalities through question-and-answer-style interviews and strategy or sabotage games.

Rather than treating the cast announcement as one promotional beat and moving on, The Traitors is using the weeks leading into the premiere to give viewers repeated opportunities to form opinions about the players.

That is particularly valuable for a competition show built around alliances, deception and personality. Fans don’t necessarily need to know every contestant’s résumé before Episode 1, but giving them enough exposure to start choosing who they trust, who they question, and who they want to watch gives them a reason to become invested before the game even begins.

For New Blood, social is essentially doing some of the character development before the premiere. By the time these players enter the castle, they aren’t complete strangers anymore.

Social Is Becoming Part of the Show

The strongest strategies across these four releases look different, but they all start from the same place: the social strategy makes sense for the show.

Adults understands the internet culture of its Gen Z audience and creates content within it. Chad Powers takes a show built around football directly into football culture. Earle Meets World uses the larger Netflix ecosystem to move between overlapping audiences. The Traitors: New Blood recognizes that its new cast needs to become characters fans care about before the game gets underway.

None of these strategies depend on simply posting more. They give audiences something they can’t get by watching a trailer, seeing an ad or scrolling through clips from an episode.

That’s where social can have the biggest impact during a crowded launch window. The opportunity isn’t only to promote what happens on screen. It’s to build an entire world around it that gives fans a reason to pay attention before the premiere, engage while the show is airing, and keep coming back after the credits roll.