Long before Hollywood faced a historic double strike, Amazon made a plan to turn one of its hit Prime Video dramas into the appointment TV event of the summer. Now that showrunner Jenny Han and the cast are prohibited from promoting the series, marketing experts believe the tech giant could still manage to persuade viewers to kick the binging habit with the help of social media influencers.
The first season of “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” which was released all at once in keeping with the popular binge-model, was a viral success. But rather than bet on a repeat, the company opted to release Season 2 weekly: The show premiered the new season’s first three episodes Friday and is set to release episodes weekly through the season finale on Aug. 18.
A television adaptation of Han’s YA trilogy, the show follows Belly (Lola Tung) as she gets entangled in a love triangle with two brothers she’s spent the summers with her entire childhood. The new episodes follow the aftermath of her “one perfect summer” as new complications and heartbreak bring Belly and those around her back to Cousins Beach.
“We really try to make those decisions based on really what feels right for the show,” Amazon Studios television head Vernon Sanders told TheWrap of the decision to change the release strategy. “When we talked to Jenny about Season 2, we wanted to be in the conversation with those fans longer and we felt that the creative [direction] of Season 2 warranted this kind of release pattern.”
Beyond the schedule shift, Amazon is enlisting influencers to help build the show’s momentum on TikTok. The hashtag #TheSummerITurnedPretty has accumulated more than 1.3 billion views on the video-sharing service to date, the company reported. The show’s official TikTok account also currently has more than 1.2 million followers, gaining more than 200,000 in the weeks before the launch of Season 2.
After learning that a majority of viewers found the show from videos posted on the platform after the release of the first season (thanks in no small part to its Taylor Swift-infused soundtrack), Amazon plans to make creating TikTok content a priority during the Season 2 rollout.
But TikTok is not the only social network on Amazon’s radar. The company is also investing in content for the show’s recently launched broadcast channel on Instagram, which it says has garnered more than 192,000 members to date. It will feature updates and new content every Friday. The show is also active on Threads, Meta’s newest app, where it already gathered more than 173,000 followers.
“With changes in media consumption and younger audiences’ behaviors, the entertainment industry has had to adapt the tried and true marketing methods of trailers, [behind the scenes] content and PR,” said Gabe Gordon, marketing expert, co-founder and managing partner of the Reach Agency. “So rather than put a trailer in an interruptive ad, you can bring audiences into the story of a show through influencer parodies, authentic BTS from the cast, memes of show clips or filters that allow the audience to co-create with the IP in a shareable format.”
Those tactics, Gordon added are “crucial” to building buzz.
Amazon also hosted screenings of the first two episodes exclusively for Prime members at 109 movie theaters in 62 U.S. markets Wednesday.
The goal is to make what the company has dubbed “Summer Fridays” into a weekly can’t-miss streaming event. With bonus featurettes already banked to complement episode releases, influencers will be creating content to promote the series throughout the season’s run, Amazon told TheWrap.
The use of social media creators’ content should help keep the conversation going as Han and the cast are expected to be out of circulation for the duration of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Both unions’ rules prohibit promotional work while on strike.
Gordon, who helped promote films like “No Time to Die” and the second season of Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building” at the Reach Agency, said influencers have been helping marketing firms promote TV shows and movies even before the strike. Their original content can help introduce or bring new audiences to programming, given that access to show’s original cast and footage is already hard to come by for marketing partners. The content ranges from recreating looks seen in trailers with makeup tutorials or fashion highlights, recreating scenes from action sequences or relating the show’s storylines to their everyday lives in satirical skits.
“Allowing creators to help tell your stories to audiences by focusing on niche interest, or making the story more relatable, is an area we only see expanding in entertainment marketing despite the circumstances of a strike,” Gordon said in an email.
While “The Summer I Turned Pretty” received a Season 2 renewal before its series premiere even aired, the show has yet to be renewed for a third season. It’s not clear if the strikes delayed getting a deal in place or if Amazon might be waiting to see if its experiments with a weekly release schedule and social media promotion pan out before committing to more time at Cousins Beach, but the source material is there — Han’s book series spans a trilogy. Amazon wouldn’t comment on its plans.
“The Summer I Turned Pretty” is far from the only Prime Video series to shift to a weekly rollout — just last month, the final season of “Jack Ryan” debuted to a weekly release vs. a binge model.
“We’ve done it with ‘The Boys,’ we’ve done it with [‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’], some really popular shows,” Sanders said about Prime Video’s weekly release strategy. “That doesn’t mean we’ll always do that, but in special circumstances, when it feels like we’ve got something where there’s an audience that really wants to watch it multiple times, talk about it multiple times, listen to the music, we want to lean in that direction.”
“The Summer I Turned Pretty” releases new episodes Fridays on Prime Video.
Lucas Manfredi contributed to this story.
