When Mike Karns talks about Be More Chill, he doesn’t start with Broadway. He starts with a cast album quietly uploaded to the internet after an off-Broadway run that was, by all traditional measures, over.

The show had closed. No stars. No Tony-winning creatives. No seven-figure ad budget. Just a recording and a small, weirdly intense group of teenagers and young adults who started sharing songs, fan art, and memes on Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube.

As Karns tells it in his Dare to Disrupt interview, the numbers started to spike in places no one in the Broadway establishment was watching: streams, fan edits, Discord servers, obsessive lyric threads. By the time producers realized what was happening, the show’s fandom had already decided it deserved a second life—and that digital groundswell helped push an off-Broadway cult favorite all the way to a Broadway house.

That arc—obscure show, dead run, digital resurrection, Broadway transfer—is the story of Marathon Digital in a nutshell. It’s also a clean example of what happens when you stop treating social media as a billboard and start treating it as the product engine.

From billboards and billings to feeds and fandoms

For a long time, Broadway marketing was a pretty stable formula. You bought traditional media (subway posters, taxi tops, TV spots), hired a PR firm to chase reviews and morning-show segments, and, if you could afford it, attached a famous name above the title.

Success meant: get the New York Times to like you, get tourists to recognize you, and get group-sales buyers to feel safe recommending you. The “marketing stack” was critics, concierges, and cash-heavy media buys.

When social platforms first showed up, most shows just copy-pasted that mindset. Facebook pages and Twitter accounts became extensions of the press office: key art, opening-night photos, pull quotes from reviews, maybe a backstage shot if someone remembered to post it.

It was broadcast thinking on interactive channels. One-way messaging, tightly controlled, optimized for brand safety, not conversation. Fans might comment, but the show rarely talked back in any meaningful way.

That model has a hard ceiling. It assumes attention is bought, not earned. It assumes the most important audience is the one walking past your poster, not the one replaying your soundtrack for the 50th time at 2 a.m.

By the time Marathon Digital entered the picture, the gap was obvious: the people who actually moved tickets—superfans, stans, theater kids, niche communities—were talking to each other constantly online, and most shows were barely in the room.

What Marathon Digital changed about Broadway marketing

Marathon Digital’s core move was simple but radical: treat social media as the primary stage for the show’s community, not just a trailer for the “real” thing. That meant building feeds that felt like fandom hubs, not corporate accounts.

On Be More Chill, that looked like leaning into the specific language, jokes, and anxieties of the audience that had already formed around the cast album. Instead of generic “Get your tickets now!” posts, they amplified fan art, shared memes, and acknowledged the hyper-online culture that had adopted the show.

According to CBS’s breakdown of the show’s rise, the cast album racked up tens of millions of streams before the Broadway transfer was even announced. That wasn’t a marketing plan; it was an organic proof-of-demand signal that Marathon helped surface, organize, and then weaponize.

This wasn’t just about posting more often. It was about designing for niche discovery. Clips were cut to be shareable in specific subcultures. Content was tuned for platforms where theater kids actually lived—Tumblr, Twitter, TikTok—rather than just Facebook for their parents.

Real-time engagement was another big shift. When fans live-tweeted performances, Marathon didn’t ignore it; they replied, reshared, and sometimes built content around specific fans’ reactions. The show’s “life” extended far beyond the two-and-a-half hours on stage into a continuous, participatory experience.

That approach created a new kind of marketing role inside productions. Suddenly, you needed people who understood fandom dynamics, meme culture, and platform-native storytelling—not just media buyers and press reps. “Digital” stopped being a line item and became a core creative function.

Marathon’s founder, Mike Karns, went from “the social guy” to a recognized architect of this new model, eventually serving as a juror for the Clio Awards on entertainment marketing. That’s a signal: the industry started treating digital fan work as real, high-stakes creative, not an afterthought.

What founders can steal from Broadway’s digital revolution

Underneath the theater specifics, the Marathon Digital Broadway marketing story is about something broader: digital fan communities can be the main driver of a business, not just a nice-to-have “engagement” metric.

In Be More Chill, the “product” that fans obsessed over wasn’t the theater building or the ad campaign—it was the emotional experience of the songs, the characters, and the feeling of being part of a weird, passionate in-group. The Broadway transfer was almost a byproduct of that energy.

If you’re building anything consumer-facing—apps, games, creator tools, niche marketplaces—the parallel is obvious. The people who talk about you in group chats and Discords are more important than the people who see your paid search ad once and bounce.

That has a few practical implications:

• Design for the superfan, not the average user. Marathon didn’t sand off the show’s quirks to appeal to everyone. They amplified the things the core audience loved most, even if it looked niche from the outside.
• Make your product easy to “quote” and remix. The cast album was inherently shareable: songs, lyrics, characters. In software, that might be GIF-able UI moments, public templates, or shareable outputs that carry your brand.
• Show up where your people already are. Marathon went deep on the platforms where theater kids were native. For you, that might be Reddit, specific subcultures on X, or a surprisingly active Facebook group.

There’s also a mindset shift: fans aren’t a demographic; they’re collaborators. Marathon treated fans as co-marketers and co-storytellers, not just eyeballs. That’s uncomfortable for teams used to control, but it’s where the leverage is.

Of course, this isn’t free of risk. Digital communities are volatile. They can turn on you fast if they feel exploited or ignored. And the revenue attribution is messy: you can’t always draw a clean line from a meme to a ticket sale or subscription.

But the alternative—pretending that community is “soft” while you over-rotate on trackable but shallow performance channels—is its own risk. Marathon’s work shows that in some markets, the only reason you have anything to measure at all is because a passionate community decided you matter.

When digital passion beats star casting

Broadway is a high-stakes, high-burn business. Shows close fast. Capital evaporates. For a long time, the safest bet was to stack the deck with stars, critics, and big media buys, then hope the tourists followed.

Marathon Digital helped prove that there’s another path: let a digital community prove demand, then build the business around that proof. In the case of Be More Chill, the community didn’t just support the show; it resurrected it.

If you’re a founder, the lesson isn’t “start a musical” or “go viral on TikTok.” It’s simpler: treat your most engaged users like the main character of your go-to-market story. Give them things to rally around, ways to see themselves in what you’re building, and room to create alongside you.

Star power still matters. So do reviews, influencers, and paid media. But as Marathon’s work shows, when digital passion compounds, it can bend the rest of the system around it. Your job is to build the kind of product—and the kind of presence—that makes that passion feel inevitable.