CBS's Promotion for the Most Popular Show on TV is Straight Out of the Social TV Playbook
Justin Hartley hosted a YouTube "livestream" trivia event that would be right at home on a second-screen app you deleted from your iPad in 2015.
By the time I finished my book, television companies weren’t exactly committed to the promotional and audience engagement strategies once referred to as “social TV.” Streaming, and more generally, on-demand viewing, kept eroding the live audience. There were so many options that even pre-sale Twitter couldn’t maintain its position as a public commons for effective live-tweeting operations. Gamified second-screen experiences and check-in apps flopped, petered out, or lost funding. The real second-screen super-app was just Messages all along.
But these faux-interactive and pseudo-participatory strategies never truly go away. In fact, they can emerge in places you least expect—like the CBS YouTube channel. The most popular broadcaster promoted network TV’s most popular series, Tracker, with a “livestream” event on Sept. 20. Teased on CBS television during football broadcasts and Instagram and TikTok, the livestream promised to share star Justin Hartley’s favorite moments from the first season, tease the upcoming second season, and facilitate some superfan trivia. The 43-minute event was like a synchronized two-app experience, a PR-filtered live-tweet Q&A, and a vanilla DVD feature or EPK clip all rolled into one. That’s not exactly a compliment, but it brings me joy to see ephemeral promotional media like this on the social internet in 2024.
The promo cycle for this promotional event followed a now-common pattern that’s been established in recent years. While CBS has been pushing Tracker season two all over the place for months, including at San Diego Comic-Con, the campaign for the livestream was much shorter. The abovementioned social posts appeared on TikTok and Instagram on Sept. 14, just six days before the livestream, with a second clip featuring a personal plea from Hartley arriving on Sept. 18. The Hartley spot aired on CBS in the same window (anecdotally, it popped up multiple times during college football and NFL broadcasts that weekend). This approach—part of what I call ephemeral media events in my academic work—embraces our fractured attention economy with an expedited promo cycle leading into low-stakes, low-cost content. There’s still an effort to build anticipation for a quasi-live, interactive event; the suddenness or the speed of getting there is just more pronounced.
Does it work? It barely matters. In the case of the Tracker livestream, the social posts didn’t receive significant engagement. The TikTok with Hartley received just over 900 likes, while the Instagram version generated a few more comments. The YouTube stream, which is still available, hasn’t cracked 10,000 views. On the one hand, you might say that a free live event featuring one of TV’s biggest stars (with 2.5 million Instagram followers) should be labeled a failure at sub-10K streams on YouTube. On the other hand, the livestream surely cost nothing to produce and reminded thousands of people about season two’s Oct. 13 premiere date. Similar to the old strategy of releasing the prior season on DVD a few weeks before the next debuts, this event circulated more Tracker stuff in the vibeosphere.
As for the event itself: Well, it’s probably best that a tiny fraction of Tracker’s weekly audience watched it. Despite the live tag and an endearing 10-second countdown start, the stream wasn’t really live. Instead, it spliced pre-produced segments with Hartley (and later his co-stars) into a clumsy “conversation” with Entertainment Tonight host Nischelle Turner. Hartley’s portion was shot at the same time as the spots for the event. His clothes and the location (vaguely “on set”) are the same in both.
The stream barely attempted to construct a sense of liveness. Host and subject used transitional phrases to link the questions with the answers but often clumsily repeated one another. Other times, the camera awkwardly lingered on Hartley or Turner before cutting to the other, not like you’d see in a choppy livestream but rather like the editors left a little space to stitch the two sides together. Here’s one example where Hartley talks about Tracker’s revolving locations (“they’re like a co-star,” folks), and Turner chimes in with the same line. Turner is the perfect host for an event like this (complimentary), given that it played like a junket interview that would pop up for 90 seconds on Entertainment Tonight or be included in a series’ electronic press kit (EPK) material. But there’s a reason why those segments run for 90 seconds on ET or get chopped into two-minute bits on a network press website. Forty-three minutes is too long.
The event also featured a trivia contest for viewers provided by third-party product Crowdpurr. On the positive side, Crowdpurr enables mobile browser (rather than app download) trivia participation. On the negative side, the stream’s facilitation of trivia was just as slack as the interview segments. Turner read the multiple-choice question aloud and then vamped for 10 seconds. A few times, she looked off-camera, waiting for a signal to continue before inserting platitudes like “Alright, I love that.”
Hartley did not participate in the trivia portion of the event. The best moment of the event came early on when, after he delivered his introductory remarks, Hartley said, “Oh! And good luck on your trivia. Let’s have some fun. Uh…that said, do what you want to kick us off.” The “your” and “you” did much heavy lifting there. Hartley nearly forgot about the trivia component and likely didn’t know who would be on the other side of the chat when he filmed his portion.
The event never evolved into something more interactive. Each question awkwardly interrupted an already awkward flow. Participants allegedly scored more points for answering correctly and quickly, but that competition wrinkle didn’t play any role in the stream. The only acknowledgment of participants arrived near the end of the event when Turner announced the top three scores. I snapped a screengrab of a larger leaderboard that briefly flashed on-screen, raising additional suspicions. Though the stream featured just eight questions, the leaderboard suggested that there were 11. Likewise, the leaderboard’s display of the top three leaders and then participants 31-39 could mean that just 39 people joined the contest.
If I can float a conspiracy about one of the least important things to ever appear on YouTube, the trivia results were also faked or generated earlier whenever the event was produced. Some people participated during the livestream, but the questions, scoring, and leaderboard were all a little weird. Beyond Hartley’s outfit overlap, I’m skeptical that Turner’s portion was filmed live. Her two Instagram posts promoting the event—on Sept. 18 and just 30 minutes before the night of the event—were also visibly shot at the same time. She never mentioned the event on X, where she live-tweeted during an airing of her other CBS project, Secret Celebrity Renovation, later that night.
There were no prizes for the trivia contest, so no one was harmed if it resulted in bot winners during a mostly fake livestream. And if that portion of the livestream was ultimately legitimate, I’d recommend a better scoring system.
Trivia conspiracies aside, the event concluded with a plug for another promotional event: “The Tracker Fan Experience with Autocamp.” Per the co-branded website, the Tracker Fan Experience will send sweepstake-winning fans to Joshua Tree and the Catskills, where they’ll stay in an Airstream, see some advanced episodes, and participate in “dedicated photo moments” and “themed dinners.” So, camping with an Instagram installation. I don’t hate it! The Joshua Tree experience is this weekend, so someone wishes Justin Hartley would come by the Airstream just as you read this.
The Tracker livestream demonstrates that TV companies—even the one broadcast network that people still watch—have mostly stopped trying to lure viewers to live television episodes with multi-screen experiences. But it also shows how promotional efforts haven’t completely given up multi-screen live experiences. There’s just no TV episode at the center. From the network side, it’s less about convincing people to watch at a specific moment and more about convincing them to watch at all when there are 358 other options. Of course, these strategies also work to capture the most dedicated fans and put them on a path of information collection to be used later. For media companies and their third-party partners, that’s enough to make one of the biggest broadcast TV stars of the last decade participate in 45 minutes of dull content.
This is TV Plus, a newsletter about television written by Cory Barker, a media studies professor and veteran blogger. You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky, or email me at barkerc65[at]gmail.com. Thanks for tuning in.
TRACKER! HE TRACKS STUFF!