How I'd Market 'English Teacher' on Hulu
What I'd do as 'Chief Virality Officer' for the new TV comedy series.
Hello and welcome to the 13 (!) new subscribers since my last few posts, where I debunked whether or not Instagram really suppresses promotional posts, shared some concerns about the annual Spotify Wrapped data trend, and explored the difference between ~art~ and “content”.
Today I want to talk about the digital marketing strategy for English Teacher, a newly released, queer-focused, high school based sitcom distributed on FX and Hulu.
The debut series from comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez premiered with two 30-minute episodes on Sept. 2, and aired 6 additional episodes every Monday through Oct. 14th.
I’ve been a massive BJA fan for years, ever since discovering The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo, a 5-episode web series which he wrote, directed, produced, starred in, and self-released on YouTube in 2016, back when we still called things “web series”.
In fact, I tracked down the exact post on the r/videos subreddit, where the show first came across my feed, 7+ years ago:
The series still holds up, and has been widely viewed, apart from a dip in Episode 4:
Since then, BJA has continued making hilarious videos on his YouTube (346K subscribers), TikTok (893K followers), and Instagram (505K followers) for years now.
You’ve likely seen some of his front-facing-camera TikToks, where he uses uncanny filters to create characters like T.J. Mack, most known for the viral 2023 hit, “Sittim”:
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So you can imagine my excitement when I found out FX and Hulu would be giving him the greenlight to write, produce, and star in his own, proper, big-budget TV show.
While his digital presence and previous works border on the absurd, English Teacher is played pretty… straight1.
Alvarez plays Evan Marquez, a gay English teacher at a public high school in Austin.
Surrounding him are a perfectly casted crop of comedians playing Evan’s fellow teachers (the aggro-sweetheart Sean Patton as the gym teacher, the deeply stupid Carmen Christopher as the school’s guidance counselor, the effortlessly charming Langston Kerman as the new teacher on the block, and longtime BJA collaborator Stephanie Koenig, reprising her role from the Caleb Gallo days as Evan’s bestie/foil.)
And Jordan Firstman shines as Evan’s on-again, off-again, ex-boyfriend who used to work at the school, too. Until, well… you’ll just have to see for yourself. (¡Escándalo!)
Each episode initially aired live at 10:00 PM on the cable channel FX, and was made available for streaming on Hulu the following day.
Here were the “Live and Same Day Ratings” for each episode on cable, according to Programming Insider:
I’m pretty new to understanding how TV ratings are captured, or what is considered “good” (researching for this article was my first time hearing of Programming Insider).
As a means of comparison, other programs on these days at this time were routinely getting 10-20 times English Teacher’s FX viewership. For instance, here’s what else people were watching on cable at 10 PM on Sept. 30, according to Programming Insider:
To be honest, all this chart really tells us is that at 10:00 PM on September 30th, 2024, 93% of the 31 million people in the US who still watch cable TV either watched Sports (Monday Night Football, WWE Raw, SportsCenter), the News, or CBS and NBC.
The original big three cable channels of ABC, NBC, and CBS topped the list that night, followed by the major news networks like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.
And I’m not seeing 90% of the channels my brother and I would have been watching at 10:00 PM when we had cable TV growing up, like Comedy Central, or Nickelodeon, or Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, or MTV, or BET, or the Disney Channel, or Fox.
I admittedly know very little about television ratings, but I recall reading something absurd like 95+ of the 100 most watched cable TV programs last year were NFL games.
In other words, eventized programming.
But that’s not how Brian Jordan Alvarez’s following (over two million people who primarily live on their iPhones) typically engage with his artistic works.
Nor is once-a-week, habit forming viewership how the TV comedy audience consumes anything anymore – apart from their 2-3 podcasts, or Kill Tony on Monday nights.
Besides NFL RedZone, the news, and whatever you root for / gamble on (whether it’s the New York Knicks, your alma mater’s college football team, or a contestant on The Bachelorette or RuPaul’s Drag Race) can you think of a single appointment-viewing television program that millions of people around the country gather around at someone’s apartment for, eagerly anticipating the next episode, on a weekly basis?
Game of Thrones had this 5-7 years ago, and to a much, much, smaller extent, Succession had this in the 2021-2023 range.
But English Teacher isn’t the kind of show where hundreds of theories about Evan and Malcolm’s relationship marinate on Reddit discussion boards week to week.
It’s a heartfelt, slightly left-of-center sitcom featuring a cast of (to everywhere but Chicago, New York, Austin, and Los Angeles) relative unknowns.
Maybe the return of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show had this in the Fall, until you forgot about it because you’re no longer in the habit of tuning in to a TV show once a week.
In fact, I’m willing to wager the majority of this readership – who likely has a passion for comedy and/or works in the entertainment industry – does not have cable TV.
Shows like English Teacher live and die on momentum, buzz, and word-of-mouth.
That becomes difficult to maintain when most Americans have fallen into the habit of binging television shows on streaming services, all at once.
Shane Gillis’ Tires on Netflix comes to mind as a recent, successful example of this model. Same with Nobody Wants This, that show about the hot rabbi and the podcaster.
Luckily, each new episode of English Teacher also aired the following day on Hulu, which has over 52 million paid subscribers, according to the Walt Disney Company Q4 earnings report.
(And I do feel it’s important to disclose I’m a longtime shareholder of the Walt Disney Company, and am therefore (indirectly) financially incentivized for this show to become the next Baby Reindeer).
But more importantly, I’m an artist, and I can sense the frustration of a fellow artist who seems to be doing everything within his power to get more people to watch the show he worked so very hard on for so many years.
If you take a look at his Instagram Reels lately, Brian has taken to dancing over and over to the trending sound “Breathe” by Olly Alexander, with some variation of, “Stream English Teacher on Hulu” written either on the video itself or in its caption.
I’m not exaggerating when I say this video type is 90% of what he’s posted on Instagram in the last 2 months:
These videos are getting hundreds of thousands of views, but here’s the kicker.
While it has over 52 million subscribers, Hulu is only available in the US.
Meanwhile, Brian is half-Colombian, and a lot of his other video content (e.g., T.J. Mack) appeal to people who live in Spanish-speaking countries outside the US.
In other words – they can’t watch English Teacher on Hulu, even if they desperately wanted to.
He’s got 506,000 IG followers at the moment, but my estimation is only 12-13% of them are both in the U.S. and have the means to pay for Hulu, or about 63,000 people.
Here’s some quick math to show my work:
At this point, his 63K eligible followers who have the means to watch English Teacher have probably either done so, or gave it a shot, and decided they’re not interested.
On top of that, when his Reels show up on random people’s Instagram feeds (the best case scenario for an Instagram Reel is that it gets seen by thousands of people who don’t know who you are), most of them have no idea who Brian is, nor what English Teacher is—they’re just going to scroll right past.
Worse still, Brian’s Instagram profile is not at all optimized for guiding his followers to the action he wants them to take. While his bio reads, “Binge English Teacher on Hulu”, the “link in bio” instead leads to his personal LinkTree:
At this point, you should all know how I feel about LinkTree, but let’s take a look at Brian’s, just for fun:
At the top, we can find six social icons that lead to his Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Venmo2, Cameo, and X (Twitter).
Below that are about a dozen links to glowing reviews of English Teacher in places like the LA Times and New York Times, and a few invitations to leave an audience review of English Teacher on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic:
You know what isn’t listed as one of the 19 links in his LInkTree?
A LINK TO WATCH ENGLISH TEACHER ON HULU.
And the same goes for his TikTok profile:
And his YouTube channel:
I talked about this in The Top Mistakes Every Comedian Makes on Social Media, but I’ll share a relevant excerpt, because it applies perfectly, here:
Regardless of what you post, consider that each individual social media channel (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc.) sits at the top level of a funnel designed to guide your digital audience downstream towards a specific series of actions:
That action might be to buy tickets to your upcoming tour, or to watch your newest hour-long special, or to subscribe to your mailing list, or to listen to your podcast.
But more often than not, the funnel is leaky.
Instead, comedians tend to pinball their online audience back and forth between their various, undifferentiated digital platforms at the top level of the funnel.
Rather than all pointing towards the same action, their Instagram bio links to their YouTube channel. Their YouTube videos embed their inactive Twitter account in each video description. Their Twitter bio plugs their abandoned podcast from 2021.
None of it is optimized for conversion, and so there’s a ton of friction between their growing social media presence and half-filled seats at their live shows.
The only difference here is, the link Brian wants to send his followers towards resides on Hulu, rather than his personal mailing list or punchup.live upcoming tour dates.
But even if Brian’s leaky funnel gets plugged (which it absolutely should be, and every single YouTube video on his entire channel should be funneling people towards English Teacher with a direct link in the video description), the best case scenario is that each of these platforms is bringing maybe 70,000 viewers to the show, tops.
When English Teacher was airing weekly, it got lost in the noise of everything else happening in the world for me.
I watched the first two episodes when they came out, loved them, and moved on with my life.
And when I did have time after the long work day to watch something, I got swept up in watching the Mets and the Yankees in the MLB Playoffs every other night.
And then suddenly the NBA was back.
And then it was the election cycle.
And so when I logged back into Hulu for first time in five weeks, I went, “Oh yeah! I’ve been meaning to finish this!”, and binged the rest of the season.
But I had to rewatch the first two episodes when I finally got around to episode three, because I’d completely forgotten about several major plot points and characters.
For a show with a decidedly non-cable audience, a full-season drop would’ve been more likely to contribute to increased average viewership.
Brian’s core audience grew up on YouTube and TikTok, platforms built for instant gratification, not patience.
It’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback this, but the distributors should have embraced that, making it easy for viewers to dive in to the show in its entirety.
When I eventually did watch all of English Teacher, I loved it.
And told my mom about it.
And she loved it, too.
That’s word-of-mouth!!
The problem is that it took 4 months after the initial episode release.
I’ve been a Brian Jordan Alvarez fan since 2017— I quote Freckle from Caleb Gallo all the time, even if people rarely know what I’m referencing.
Watching his evolution into becoming a TikTok and Instagram star, and now leading a Hulu Original, has been deeply inspiring as a fellow person posting things online.
But if I, someone in the 98th percentile of Brian Jordan Alvarez awareness and fandom, completely forgot about English Teacher for two months, what does that say about the strategy of only focusing on mobilizing his digital audience to Hulu?
It tells me that they have their marketing strategy completely backwards.
Hulu recently launched a big play into comedy with their HULarioUs campaign.
English Teacher belongs as part of this comedy rebrand.
It’s sharp, weird, and perfectly suited for an audience that already loves many of the existing Hulu Originals comedy series.
They’re all really funny!! They have great taste!!
I’d advise them to use their mountains of data and internal ~algorithms~ to cross-promote the show to subscribers in a similar audience segmentation who watch shows like Pose, What We Do In The Shadows, or Shrill, or the upcoming stand-up comedy special from Matteo Lane.
Rather than trying to get 10% of Brian’s Instagram followers to get off Instagram, and pay for and watch Hulu on their TV on their computer, how about focusing on persuading 2% of Hulu’s 52,000,000 subscribers to watch a really funny, accessible, mass-appeal comedy show on the app they already pay for and browse every day?
That would be as many views as the average episode of Caleb Gallo got on YouTube.
And beyond Hulu, I would encourage them to leverage the entire Disney ecosystem.
You can now browse Hulu within Disney+, which currently has 158+ million subscribers worldwide, triple the count of Hulu.
Disney+ has dozens of musicals and campy favorites that resonate with English Teacher’s tone and sensibilities.
Meanwhile, ESPN+ is making strides in inclusive branding—why not integrate ads for the show during WNBA games, or other audience-aligned events and programming?
This is the beauty of Hulu being part of Disney: you can connect an international network of audiences across multiple, massive platforms.
Use these internal, cross-promotional features to your advantage!
Take Nobody Wants This, the recent, lighthearted, rom-com hit on Netflix.
While I’m admittedly in the exact demo for that show (jewish, pickup basketball, etc.), I watched the entire thing in 48 hours, simply because it was marketed to me at the top of the Netflix app on my Smart TV, with a trailer already playing, a compelling description, and it all sounded charming enough that I gave it an episode.
And then I watched the whole thing in two sittings.
And so did a meaningful percentage of their other, 84 million subscribers in the US, and across their international base of 280+ million subscribers.
And then it became displayed #1 on the Top 10 TV Shows on the platform.
But it wasn’t because they were banking on Adam Brody going viral on Instagram every day to promote the show.
It was because they similarly identified a (relatively unknown but incredibly talented) writer with a great concept for a TV series in Erin Foster, and used their distribution and free publicity that is their own personal Times Square billboard (25-50% of the SOV of the millions of people who open Netflix every day), A/B tested targeted copy to appeal to single guys like me who wouldn’t ordinarily watch a ten episode romantic comedy, A/B tested eye-catching thumbnails, made a compelling trailer, and most importantly of all, they had a great, bingeable, charming show on the other end of it.
Unsurprisingly, it skyrocketed to the top show on the platform for several weeks.
Same with Baby Reindeer. Richard Gadd spent half a decade creating a deeply personal and compelling show, and Netflix not only handled the distribution, but the marketing.
Granted, that marketing strategy basically consisted of putting it at the top of the screen for millions of people, and listing it in their Top 10 shows, but at no point was Gadd expected to promote the show himself. I imagine that was a big part of his decision to distribute it through Netflix, as opposed to creating a Kickstarter and self-releasing on YouTube.
Speaking of YouTube, I imagine Hulu and Netflix function pretty similarly to it, in that the majority of traffic to an individual episode of a TV show comes from the platform itself.
What I mean by this, is that Mr. Beast doesn’t get millions of views on every YouTube video he posts because he promotes them daily on his Instagram page.
He gets millions of views on every YouTube video because he is constantly optimizing for the platform he’s posting them on - YouTube.
He will test multiple different titles, thumbnails, and video descriptions for a single video, optimizing for click-through rate (CTR) and average view percentage (AV%).
In this context, here are the “Thumbnails”, “Titles”, and “Video Descriptions” for English Teacher, as they currently appear on the Hulu website on my laptop.
I think every single episode could be optimized with this, “Mr. Beast-ified” mindset:
Other than the home page and native browsing features, the other top Traffic Sources for an organic video on YouTube tend to be from other YouTube videos, where your video could be featured as a “Suggested Video” afterwards.
I imagine Hulu and Netflix are not all that different, in this aspect.
Hulu has a version of this, with their “You May Also Like” subtab:
**I have absolutely zero inside information**, but if I were developing a formula to recommend myself the Hulu shows I’d be most likely to enjoy, I’d probably base those suggestions on some version of Total Watch Percentage within the audience segmentation I’m classified within (18-39 year old males, single, lives in New York City, likes comedy, typically watches Hulu on their TV, lethal from three, etc.)
And English Teacher’s target segmentation is far beyond, “LGBTQ+”, or “light-hearted comedy”.
That’s lazy.
English Teacher is simultaneously anti-tech bro, and anti-over-the-top-leftism.
It can appeal to both sides of the political aisle.
There’s a reason it takes place in Austin, the “blueberry in the tomato soup” of Texas.
Ultimately, everything comes back to accessibility and reduced friction.
99.99% of people who watched that Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight watched it– myself included – simply because it was really easy to do so.3
Millions of people opened Netflix that night, saw it at the top of the screen, and pressed “Play”.
I recently took on a client in the chef creator space. I learned that in culinary school, they spend 50% on the preparation, and another 50% on the presentation.
Brian Jordan Alvarez is already the show’s writer, director, star, and producer.
He shouldn’t also have to be it’s Chief Marketing Officer.
David Zucker is a legally blind, digital marketing consultant based in New York City. A former analyst at TikTok, his unique, data-driven approach has catapulted the growth of his international client base of comedians and companies within the entertainment industry. To set up an initial consultation, click here.
(No pun intended)
(The other 0.01% was Mike Tyson)
dear david,
another great piece!
love "english teacher," love the points you make about it. hulu and disney if you're reading this, LISTEN!
thanks for sharing!
love
myq