TV.com/Relay

Broadcast Promo Spots
Creative Director, CBS Interactive

Relay let you text strangers in real time while you watched the same show they did, live as it aired. Reality or action drama, it didn't matter. The feed moved with the broadcast, anonymous, and gone when the episode ended. My job was two broadcast spots that sold that feeling in the length of a commercial break, without it looking like a chat room bolted onto a TV.

The idea everyone already understood was the second screen: phone in one hand, show on the other, reacting out loud to nobody in the room. The spots put someone on the other end of that reaction. A stranger watching the same scene, typing back, as invested as you were and just as anonymous. We cut the on-screen drama against the live feed so the two moved as one thing, the plot twist and the pile-on landing in the same second.

Social TV before the phrase caught on. It only lived as long as the episode did, which was the whole point.